EMC rolls out storage virtualization for SAN

EMC has announced worldwide availability in Q3 of a storage virtualization
solution for fiber channel-based storage area networks (SANs). The solution,
which is presently meant for large organizations, provides storage volume
management, which can be used to create logical storage volumes for the servers
from physical storage volumes. The ability to create logical volumes provides
advantages such as dynamic volume migration and better volume management.

The solution works as a combination of an EMC appliance (it is not a storage
box) and special SAN switches, which provide port-level access to the
virtualization operations of the appliance. These switches, available from
Brocade, Cisco, and later, McData, are different from traditional SAN switches
provided by these vendors, but integrate seamlessly with the existing switches.

The appliance connects directly to the switches and performs all
virtualization operations. EMC differentiates its virtualization offering from
other vendors by providing virtualization engine on the storage network, rather
that on the storage device, or in the storage data path.

EMC Invista Architecture

With the virtualization engine being on the network, it enables faster volume
migration, as the data does not have to travel to the servers for migration.
This way data can be migrated without disturbing the applications or the primary
volume whose data is being migrated.

The solution works with storage devices provided by various vendors and not
necessarily EMC and follows the FAIS (Fabric Application Interface Standard and
SNIAs (Storage Networking Industry Association) SMI-S (Storage Management
Initiative) specification for storage management.

The EMC virtualization product, Invista, costs $2,25,000 for managing 64TB of
data.

ANOOP MANGLA

(The writer was hosted by EMC at Singapore)