The SAN is not dead, certainly not yet, but is it now staring at a diminishing future? There now seems to be every chance that, in the Cloud at least, that is exactly what is happening.
Two separate announcements, from Elastic Stack and Morphlabs, show that the Storage Area Network environment that has long been an integral component of large corporate and Cloud infrastructures could now be facing a foreshortened future.
Both companies, in their own way, have targeted the fact that low cost, commodity hardware now offers sufficient resources to handle the data storage requirements of Cloud services. This, they both claim, includes the required levels of resilience and data replication to accommodate the demands generated by multiple Virtual Machine instances being created and shut down.
Bottom line on all this is a significant cut in operating costs because implementing a SAN has traditionally required building a duplicate network of storage devices in order to provide that required resilience.
Both Morphlabs and Elastic Stack suggest that this investment is now no longer required. And the investment can be significant for, as Elastic Stack CEO Richard Davies, observes it is in the very nature of the way SANs have developed as proprietary overlays on commodity technology.
In this case the commodity hardware can even be the disk drives integral to the compute servers, though more commonly it will be RAID arrays. The just-launched version 2 of Elastic Stack now uses distributed block storage – Network RAID – to offer the required levels of performance and data redundancy. All the data is replicated across the system so that any failure of an individual node will cause operational delays or loss of data.
According to Davies, the system can scale to manage many 10’s of Terabytes. The stack itself is a software environment designed to run on datacentre infrastructures built from a wide range of low cost commodity servers. According to the company it can work equally well as the infrastructure for an enterprise that is looking to develop a presence in the Cloud , or for a service provider looking to reduce both capital expenditure and operational costs.
To help with this process, Version 2 also includes a new control panel built using Ajax. This is claimed to be faster and more straight forward in the way it manages the creation and operation of virtual servers. It also adds an increased range of service payment options allowing users to customise pricing and the currencies used to suit their marketplace. Morphlabs is a bit different from Elastic Stack in being more than just a software solution. According to CEO Winston Damarillo there is a certain inevitability to this:
The software runs on open source platforms, but the company has taken this a step further by getting involved with the Open Blueprint for Hardware movement, which has sprung out of developments at Facebook and Google. This applies the open source model to hardware design and development – having commodity hardware that is open to improvement from amongst the user community.
Damarillo sees this as a very disruptive alternative approach to Cloud deployment, as it is cheaper than Amazon by service providers, gives greater Cloud -level control, and is particularly good for emerging countries, which he sees as an important target market. Its cost and ease of deployment means that service providers can emerge in these countries to service local demand, rather than have users overload limited international gateways trying to use services such as Amazon. This approach also brings a direct impact on the current use of SANs, as Damarillo points out.
The design philosophy underpinning the Morphlabs system is based on providing enterprises with the ability to build low-cost private Cloud resources that are easy to manage. But as Damarillo observes, most enterprise these days already have partnerships with external datacentre service
