Posts Tagged ‘SDN’
EVO:Rail – VMware enters the hyperconverged space
A very exciting announcement was made at VMworld today: EVO:Rail. I’ve known for a while about this under the codename “Marvin” (and EMC’s appliance related to this codenamed “Mystic”), now it is out there with it’s official naming. But what is it? Disclaimer: I work for EMC, but what I write here are my own opinions.
First things first: A quick intro to hyper-converged
First we had converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure operates by grouping multiple components together into a single, optimized computing package. Components of a converged infrastructure may include servers, data-storage devices, networking equipment and software for IT infrastructure management, automation and orchestration. VCE’s Vblock is a prime example of converged infrastructure. Below that we have reference architectures like EMC’s VSPEX and NetApp’s Flexpod.
So on to even higher integration and automation: “hyper-converged”. Hyper-converged architectures consolidate and manage compute, Read the rest of this entry »
Software-defined Storage = Virtualized Storage = vSAN?
I recently get more and more into discussions around Software-defined storage and storage virtualization. Is it the same, is it partly the same, is it something totally different? In this blog post I’ll try to shed some light on the technologies of today around these buzzwords and try to make some sense at the same time.
What we used to call virtualizing storage
Before we launched the idea of the Software-defined Datacenter (SDDC) and Software-defined Storage (SDS), we were already putting hardware between storage and hosts creating an abstraction layer between the two. Good examples of this technologies are IBM’s SVC and EMC’s VPLEX.

A good example of abstraction of storage from the underlying hardware – VPLEX in a metro configuration abstracting the underlying storage to add value of stretching a LUN across phyisical locations
These technologies look south for their storage requirements, abstract this storage and Read the rest of this entry »