Thursday, July 18, 2013

Software Defined Storage Technologies are here!

As you might be already aware of the news EMC's latest acquisition of ScaleIO. It is a Israeli startup which has been in stealth mode and suddenly the news breaks up that EMC has bought the company for $300 Million last week.

But before I could hear about the acquistion of ScaleIO, I was hooked onto Nutanix. Nutanix is also a SAN free solution and provides hardware appliances.

The architecture is more or less the same.

Both use the local storage of the servers and present it as a shared storage to the hypervisor.

Yesterday I had the opportunity of contacting ScaleIO and got some insight on how technology really works.

ScaleIO's ECS (Elastic Converged Storage) deploys a virtual appliance on top of VMware Hypervisor, in case of Hyper-V it provides an exe file to abstract the storage from local disks and provides as a shared pool of storage.

I was told that I need at least 3 servers with 3TB storage to run and I was also offered a trial software to try it out.

ScaleIO seems highly scalable as opposed to Nutanix has the limitation of scaling up to 50 Nodes.

A Nutanix node consists of 4 Servers in built.

I am yet to dive in to the technologies but both seems really cool concepts, and can these kill the SAN business of the big boys?

www.scaleio.com
www.nutanix.com