A Step Towards Unified Storage

Used with permission from The TANEJA Group, Inc.

Storage architectures are going through a fundamental change. Whereas we have seen most legacy players continue to offer traditional architectures that present a FC interface towards the host and either FC or SCSI, or more recently, SATA drives on the backend, newer players have developed iSCSI storage using grid principles and made the management of storage much easier. We have also seen players combine NAS and SAN in the same box. Yet others have applied the principles of virtualization to simplify management. We believe all these are major steps towards the concept of Unified Storage that would bring many of these isolated elements together. While a number of traditional players are moving in this direction the most innovative energy is coming from newer, smaller players. One of those that we discuss in detail here is RELDATA that has combined the grid principles with NAS/SAN convergence but focused entirely on a subset of Unified Storage that can be thought of as Unified IP Storage. We believe there is broad applicability for this technology, especially for the medium size enterprises where cost and simplicity are the magic words.

A Step Towards Unified Storage
The goal of unified storage is to effectively utilize all available capacity across heterogeneous storage, allow access to this storage via block or file protocols, simplify allocation and management, and reduce costs of managing storage over time. The technologies that are central to achieving this goal include heterogeneous virtualization and grid computing. Over the past five years or so a number of vendors have innovated along these lines and produced some interesting combinations but no one has yet presented a completely unified storage. We are very close, however, to achieving this objective. We look at an interesting player here that we believe has produced a solid Unified IP Storage offering. But before we look at the details of their architecture let's examine the innovations that have occurred so far in the market. We describe these innovations along five dimensions.