The dominant model in storage today is the SAN (Storage Area Network), a.k.a. "storage mainframe." While "SAN" makes you think of a storage version of a LAN (Local Area Network), it is far from it. In fact, SAN's are monolithic, mono-vendor, administratively heavy-weight, burdensome beasts. They are laden with "must-have" features that sound good, but which are mostly crippled versions of functions performed more effectively, at lower cost, by server software.
Most storage vendors make it clear what they mean by the KISS principle: "Keep it SAN Storage." Why? more revenues, more profits, more high-margin maintenance -- in general, more for the vendor and less for the buyer. It's time for buyers to revolt. It's time to enter a post-SAN world of simple effectiveness. It's time for storage to be fast, scalable and affordable. It's time for a return to the original meaning of KISS: "Keep it Simple, Stupid." In other words, it's time for the Xio ISE storage blade.
The Controller is the Problem
Storage buyers buy, well, ... storage. Duhh. If they didn't need storage, they wouldn't be talking with storage vendors. And it's true that storage vendors deliver storage. But what do they sell? Anything but storage. It sounds strange, but it's not -- since every storage vendor sells storage, how can you tell one storage vendor from another? Only by talking about something else. Today it is standard practice for storage vendors to emphasize the importance of features that are somehow related to storage, but aren't actually storage.
This brings us to the controller. Every traditional storage vendor has a monolithic controller. The controller is an expensive box that sits between the servers and the actual storage. The controller is where all these storage-related features are implemented. The game every storage vendor plays is to make you want what's in the controller, because whatever it is, only that vendor has it. The controller is what makes you buy one vendor's terrabytes rather than another vendor's. The controller is where vendor differentiation is. Last but not least -- the controller is where vendor profits are.
What about those "must-have" features in the Controller?
I would love it if someone de-constructed them all, publicly and effectively. But let me start from a simple observation. In my job, I get to closely follow the technology decisions and deployments of dozens of growing, leading-edge companies, and I get a quick look inside many more. What I find says volumes about the status of all those "value-adding" features of storage systems: nobody uses the fancy, "value-adding" features of storage systems -- they just use storage! As in plain old storage, like reading and writing.
The reason all these leading-edge people just use plain-old KISS storage, is pretty simple: they focus on bulding technology that supports their business. The value is delivered by applications that use files and databases. Files and databases need storage. Give them storage and you're done!
Just this morning I talked with some terrific folks who operate a leading edge internet advertising service. They already handle monster volumes out of multiple data centers. When orders are placed, the orders need to get out to all the ad servers. A perfect application for that popular feature of SAN controllers, volume mirroring, right? Wrong. There are at least a handful of reasons why this would be a terrible solution. But it doesn't matter, because they get the job done, effectively, quickly and well, with mysql's replication facility. Their application puts the ad opportunity into the master database, which replicates it to read-only slaves. Problem solved.
I see this pattern everywhere: the problems that SAN vendors use to sell their controllers are better solved, more simply and with less expense, with applications and server software.
Introducing the no-controller SAN: post-SAN Storage
What does that mean? If you remove the controller in a SAN, what are you left with?
With the old SAN vendors, you're left with a big, expensive pile of storage you can't use. In the post-SAN world, exemplified by the Xio ISE, you've got what amounts to storage blades. You can direct-connect a storage blade to a server or to a couple of servers, or you can network a set of blades together with a set of servers.
Each ISE storage blade comes with a full complement of storage capacity and performance. If you need a truly giant pool of storage, you can combine any number of them into a single volume using server-based software. But more likely you'll want to share them among a pool of servers, which can easily be automated using RESTful calls from a UI or script.
Then there's the issue of storage performance. Bigger disk capacities equals shrinking performance. That's why Fusion IO and similar companies are so hot. Note that Fusion IO doesn't have controllers or any of the fancy (= useless) features that come with them. People are snapping them up anyway. Maybe that post-SAN storage is worth looking into ... you could save a bunch of money, keep things simple and above all deliver the performance your business demands. If you've got the kind of problem Fusion IO says they solve (a storage performance problem), you should do yourself a favor and discover how Hyper-ISE delivers the performance you need at price you can afford. And Hyper ISE gives you performance while keeping your data safe and providing full fail-over, unlike Fusion IO, which isn't really "storage" at all -- it's just a board in a server, so when anything about that server goes wrong, your data goes wrong with it..
Conclusion
Most computer storage today is anything but simple, scalable or affordable. Intelligent storage buyers are increasingly buying the storage that they need and only the storage they need. They are saving money, time and trouble by refusing to buy expensive controllers that are laden with features they already have in the server, features they just don't need. These buyers have effective, simple, scalable storage that costs less, performs better and lasts longer than old-style SAN's. Welcome to the post-SAN world, where the sun shines, things are simple and life is so good, it makes you want to KISS someone in a new way.
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