Managing networked storage

Hi, I'm Jack Norris, director of Virtualization Marketing for EMC. And today I'm here to talk about managing network storage. And network storage is actually getting more complex in environments today. What we see is the emergence of not only NAS, traditional NAS storage for file and print services over the network but we're seeing the emergence of CAS, content addressable storage that's focused on compliance and securing data. We're also seeing the emergence of clustered file systems that provide high performance clustered file systems that spread data across devices for higher performance computing.

So the issue is how do you manage network storage? Each of these have special purpose management capabilities. But you need something that manages across heterogeneous environments within each of these and you also need something that can manage across. And that's where global file virtualization fits in. Because the issue here is scale. If you look at large environments it's not unusual to have a billion or more files in the environment. So if you look at a solution that requires all of your clients to access the backend storage through a propriety appliance or switch it's never going to scale to meet the needs of large enterprise environments dealing with this complexity. Global file virtualization leverages the IP network. And what you have today is you have end users accessing storage. And with global file virtualization you've got virtualization built into the fabric. And through the use of a global name space you've got logical names for the end users to access this data so data can move without disrupting the way they access.

Now how does global file virtualization scale? Let's say we're moving from file server one to file server eight. This one is full. This one has a lot of space. I can balance capacity this way. Well with global file virtualization now the ports associated with that are in the virtualization network and any end user access now flows through this virtualization space. It filters the traffic. It only deals with the data that we're relocating and then once all the data is now on this file server access goes back through the IP network.

So the issue today in managing network storage is how do you scale, how do you meet the needs of large growing enterprises that have complex network storage environments. The answer is not a simple appliance or a simple network switch to do virtualization. The answer is global file virtualization.