I’ve always been a fan of scale-out storage solutions, and I’ve always preached about them.
As data is skyrocketing, the best viable way to cope with this growth is having a system that can be scaled accordingly without the pain of data migrations involving TBs of data. One of the limits of scale-out systems however has always been the data protection techniques applied to them. RAID is inefficient, replication is too expensive, so what about Erasure Coding? Is it mature enough to become the new data protection technique for storage systems?
Last week I attended the E2EVC Conference in Brussels. It’s an independent conference about virtualization, filled with technical sessions about many different technologies and platforms: there were some VMware sessions, but the majority of them were about Citrix and Microsoft. It was a great opportunity for me as a “VMware guy” to learn about “the other sides” of the virtualization world. Among the available sessions, Microsoft Scale Out File Server (SOFS) seemed from the beginning an interesting topic; I went to listen to two sessions and I was finally able to get a better knowledge of SOFS.
“oh gosh, Luca has gone mad…” I’m almost sure this is your feeling when you read the title of this post. It’s no secret I work for Veeam, and our flagship product is Veeam Backup & Replication, a data protection solution for virtualized environments. So why did I chose that title? I like catchy titles, and most of all this is the question I asked my self after reading another blog post. Read my post, and you will understand why my final answer is “yes, damn yes!”.
I heard lately many presentations about virtualization solutions, being them orchestration solutions, or storage, networking or soemthing else, and the vendors selling them have a usual phrase “this product is designed for large companies AND service providers”. The underlying idea, coming from vendors thinking at both use cases for their products, is that a large companies is completely comparable to a service provider. At first, the thought is correct, but there is a significant difference that ultimately makes this thinking wrong.
The IT industry has always been dominated by trends. Each hystoric period has seen the raise and success of groundbraking technologies, born with the goal to solve the limits of their ancestors, by introducing new ideas, better designed for the always evolving environments.
Storage is no different. If since the ’80s the rulers have been the RAID-based monolithic arrays connected to servers via a SAN, lately new solutions are raising, with different ideas but also some common features.