Marc makes a good comment here about the use of virtualisation within the replacement lifecycle and indeed products such as USP, SVC and Invista can help in this regard. However at some stage even the virtualisation tools need replacing and the problem remains, although in a different place. I was hoping as part of the USP-V announcement HDS would indicate how they intend to help customers migrate from an existing USP which is virtualising storage, but alas it didn't happen.
Perhaps we need virtual WWNs which work in a similar way to DNS, where a small, easily replaceable and duplicatable device holds an alias of logical to physical WWNs. This appliance would be vendor independent and multiple devices would exist in the fabric as do today's DNS servers in IP. All allocations would be made once and for all via virtual WWN (vWWN) and if the storage is then virtualised that would be up to the vendor.
Of course, the difficulty with this model is how to determine which DNS entry points to the current valid copy of data... Oh well, it was only a 30 second idea....
Monday, 2 July 2007
Hardware Replacement Lifecycle Update
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Virtual WWNs sounds like a great idea. As you say, the implementation is the kicker. :-)
Some virtualisation vendors are claiming their devices can "intercept" a WWN, manipulate it (e.g. move the LUN to different storage), then "un-intercept" it - and leave the OS/apps above none the wiser. I'm trying to get hold of demo kit to try this, because it sounds like a big win.
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