Behind the Scenes with VSP Virtualized Storage
For a good part of this year, I have been part of a tremendous opportunity to see a virtualized storage platform come to existence. This week, Hitachi Data Systems released the Hitachi
Virtual Storage Platform. The VSP platform is an enterprise storage platform of extreme scale, with a maximum configuration offering 255 PB in six racks.
Virtualized storage is a great way to extend the virtualization initiatives that have made many heroes in datacenters around the world. As the VSP product was launched, there was a clear priority to reflect the infrastructure trends of today's datacenters. The VSP was designed to integrate with virtualization technologies such as VMware vSphere and Hyper-V.
VSP does not support VMware's vSphere API's for Array Integration at the release, but an incremental software update is scheduled for later this year. This isn't exactly a surprise as many of the storage products that are in the VAAI program are in the “announced support” stage versus “available now.” A few products had VAAI support for storage products ready at the vSphere 4.1 release including the modular storage offering from HDS, the AMS 2000 line. A handful of other storage products were ready from the start, with a few more making announcements for support by the end of the year having participated in the VAAI program with VMware (see my post on VAAI). A vCenter Plug-In for the VSP will be released soon.
In the course of seeing the VSP become a product, I had an opportunity to meet with engineers and product managers to understand the priorities for creating a new virtualized storage system.
The VSP took a new approach to a number of items related to virtualization, architecture and software. Aside from the upcoming VAAI support, the VSP focused on creating a series of virtualized components through the system. Enterprise storage systems such as the VSP and its competition have a number of components and interconnections that are critical architectural factors in the scale and performance of the system. For example, the VSP utilizes commodity processors (Intel quad core) on the storage directors (back end and front end) which are a big improvement over the preceding ASIC architecture. VSP can also provide automated storage tiering at the entire volume or sub-volume level with Hitachi Dynamic Tiering. This can be incredibly beneficial if a virtual machine creates a hot spot on disk and needs to be prioritized to another tier of disk when vSphere's Storage I/O control can't meet the needs of the virtual machine.
What I learned is that virtualized storage is going to only become more important in any large virtualization strategy. I'm quite excited to see what will be coming in the next iteration of VAAI features and how the virtualized storage landscape changes with new products for the current needs of the virtualized datacenter.
Note: I attended blogger events sponsored by HDS, which are governed by my official blogger disclosure.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 09/30/2010 at 12:47 PM