Virtual Storage Appliances

Its interesting to see some of the activity around Virtual Storage Appliances ( If you may call so, I'm using the Left Hand Networks lingo here, Apologies!). Falconstor , StorMagic and LeftHand Networks are bringing in some interesting products in play.

What are these Virtual Storage Appliances?

Traditionally you would use a 3rd party storage appliance(Equallogic, EMC, NetApp et al) to centralise storage in virtual environments. iSCSI is obviously the preferred protocol of choice because of the ease of use and flexibility. (There are some performance issues at very high bandwidths, and there are ways to mitigate this).

The pitch associated with VSA's is that there is no real need to invest in third party storage appliances. You could just use "spare storage" ( which could be DAS) in any of the physical machines that host a bunch of VMs. They would typically be software targets which would work in already virtualized physical machines exposing spare storage in the physical machines to other VMs.

There might really be of value to SMBs who cannot/would not invest in 3rd party storage appliances. From a holistic perspective, VSAs tighten up the case for the use of virtualization even further("Better resource management").

There however might be performance issues associated with VSAs, as of today, as they are predominantly software based. However, for a small IT shop, this might not be of much concern.