I just received the ppt's from the presentations at Storage Networking World. Looked at one of EMC's and it looked almost exactly like last year's: A few Symmetrics on the bottom (now with DG storage, too) talking thru a SAN cloud to a bunch of servers. Above the servers is the inter/intranet cloud with the client (a browser) at the very top. The difference is that, somewhere in the upper cloud, there is a "Management Station" which, presumably, has some control over all of the servers, switches and storage. I guess this is what EMC plans to use to commoditize the servers. But isn't it just another server, a metaserver? It looks like a pretty big task to implement to me. The other EMC presentation says 2003 for the shift.
Sun had a presentation of an existing SAN installation which uses Jiro for the management logic (probably on the servers). It's not obvious that EMC is 2-3 years ahead.
I missed the event, itself, due to a deadline.
Oh, I'd give an URI, but it requires an account.
On a similar topic, the first NAS "appliance" that I ever saw, in the mid-80s, was a Sun server. The creators of NFS have been all over that for a long time. They just haven't produced a tailored kernel for the purpose.
-tck |
