Symantec announced that their widely-used Veritas Storage Foundation software (more commonly known as Veritas Volume Manager and filesystem) will now include thin provisioning, migration, and a new API which allows it to directly communicate with thin-capable storage arrays. This is a smart step, certainly, and ought to be useful, but storage managers should still try to manage storage use aggressively.

Update: More details have come out about Symantec’s new capability. Read my follow-up post on Symantec’s Thin API for clarification!

Here’s the gist (as near as I can tell). Veritas Storage Foundation will include the following capabilities:

1. Native thin provisioning which will cause Veritas volume manager to allocate space in the Veritas filesystem only when data is written
2. A thin provisioning API which allows the volume manager to communicate with certain storage arrays (3PAR is highlighted, along with HDS and HP) to allocate and reclaim space as it is used in the filesystem
3. A thin migration API which allows the volume manager to tell these storage arrays to migrate existing volumes to thin-provisioned space

This is great stuff, and ought to allow folks to make better use of thin provisioning. In fact, it nicely addresses many of my concerns about thin provisioning, including un-provisioning. It’s especially nice to see that Symantec already has interested partners, and that one system (3PAR) is up and running already. Way to go!

I’ve been feverishly preparing for my upcoming TechTarget seminar series focused on storage virtualization, so I thought it might be interesting to post a few topics from the talk here on the blog.  If you’ll be in Washington DC on March 4, or Durham NC on March 6 and are interested in the world of storage and server virtualization, I’d love for you to register and attend this free seminar!

I’m kicking off with one of my favorite topics, logical volume management on servers. This is the longest-standing and most-successful face of storage virtualization, and the one I was first exposed to. Put simply, volume managers abstract block storage (LUNs, disks, partitions, what have you) into virtual “volumes” for use by the server. They look the same to the OS, and still need a filesystem, but are much more flexible, as we’ll see.

Volume managers are very common today - all modern OSes (except for that one from Apple!) have volume managers built in. Windows has the Logical Disk Manager, which I’m told was co-engineered (or something) with Veritas way back when and which I’ve covered in my Storage Magazine columns. Linux has an implementation of LVM, which I wrote something about way back when, and which has now not been supplanted by EVMS as had once been supposed. AIX it’s own twist on the original LVM, as does HP-UX. Solaris has the variously-named Solstice DiskSuite/Volume Manager which has evolved substantially in the 15 or so years I’ve been using it. And everyone has Symantec’s Veritas Volume Manager/Foundation Suite, which we in “the biz” view with considerable admiration and some skepticism, as is the case with all good front runners!

Folks mostly use volume managers for flexibility. It’s really quite amazing what you can do when your servers run them, enough that you often wonder how you got along without them!

• You can resize volumes (aka file systems or drives) on the fly (if your file system supports this as most modern ones do)
• You can protect data with RAID, even if your storage doesn’t support it (think bare disk drives)
• You can add storage capacity on the fly by concatenating new to old or (maybe) expanding existing stripes and RAID sets
• You can mirror volumes, create snapshots, and even replicate data to remote locations (this functionality varies by product, of course)
• One of the most powerful things (to me) was the ability to migrate live volumes from one storage device to another when making infrastructure changes

In short, volume management = server-based storage virtualization! So even if you were skeptical about the claims about storage virtualization, you might already be using it! Amazingly, a good volume manager can do anything a storage virtualization appliance or enterprise storage array can do. In fact, some virtualization appliances have more than a little volume management source code in them…

And the only cost for all this great stuff is the impact on your server’s CPU, memory, bus, access control, etc…

The chart below compares the major volume managers, and includes a little easter egg at the bottom… But we’ll cover that on another day.

XenSource just announced that they’ll embed Symantec-née-Veritas‘ server-side storage virtualization software into their server virtualization offering. This is great news, since server virtualization has boiling for more than a year now with precious little storage integration to be seen. Although XenSource is a distant second in the world of server virtualization, they’re close enough to put heat on leader, VMware. And every time an upstart prompts the market leader to innovate, I’m cheering. Plus, I’ve been a fan of VxVM for decades.

I for one was surprised at the small impact EMC has had on VMware. One systems administrator I talked to enthusiastically pointed out how great it was that big bad old EMC didn’t ruin VMware, but it cuts both ways. EMC has tremendous knowledge of the realities of managing storage in the enterprise, yet this hasn’t much rubbed off on VMware. After all, last I heard, they were still telling users to provision a single LUN for multiple virtual servers, and mixing OS and application data on the virtual C: drive…

Maybe we’ll see a response from EMC. EMC added volume management to PowerPath 4.0 back in 2003, and rumor had it they were developing their own full-featured multi-platform alternative to Veritas Volume Manager/Foundation Suite. Could this be headed into the VMware codebase? That would be a great way to gain some traction outside the storage space!

Yes, folks, China is rising in storage industry. A while back, my good friend Marc Staimer suggested that Huawei might become the next great storage vendor. Well, Huawei’s joint venture with 3Com has now become 3Com’s unit in China, H3C. That’s right, Bob Metcalfe’s old company bought Huawei out of the venture this year in an attempt to regain the number two market position in networking. And since H3C has long had a strong interest in the storage side of the network, we might see 3Com attack the low end of the storage industry next year!

H3C already has a long list of products, most based on in-house hardware and OEM software. On the storage side, the company makes an iSCSI storage array platform dubbed “Neocean”. This storage platform, selling strongly in China, is alleged to leverage technology licensed from FalconStor (on the low-end IX1000), Intransa (on the bigger IX5000), as well as iVivity and Xyratex. OEM storage developer Ciprico today announced that it will be working with H3C on the next generation. H3C also sells a WAFS accelerator leveraging Expand Networks software. All of these should be coming to the United States next year.

Huawei itself is also getting back into the storage market in the form of a joint venture with Symantec, creatively called Huawei-Symantec. This company is set to be coming out with a line of network devices with Veritas-based software built in. We’re hearing about virus scanning and content indexing appliances, as well as NAS and SAN arrays which will include storage foundation software from Symantec right out of the box.

Who knows what’s next from Huawei? I’d guess expanded services, more resellers in the West, and more OEM deals to create bigger systems. In a few years, they might give Hitachi and EMC trouble in the enterprise market, especially when big server vendors like Sun, SGI, Dell, and HP start rethinking their OEM strategies…