A Stacked Feature Request

I had Brocade in earlier in the week and we were chewing the fat over SAN futures, FC vs iSCSI vs FCoE etc and of course the normal discussions about Cisco's dominance of the IP space and whether Brocade can do anything to halt the march of Cisco into the SAN space? Can they leverage the Foundry purchase and move into Cisco's space and at least become a credible alternative in the Enterprise Data Centre space? It's going to be hard for them to compete but we all like to cheer the under-dog in the UK and I hope that they do; the IP network space needs someone keeping Cisco honest, dominant players really aren't that healthy.

And the conversation moved round to Virtualisation, meandered round VMware as these things normally do; then onto Storage Virtualisation and onto Brocade's DMM product. I'm always interested in things which could make migration easier and at the moment we tend to do it mostly using host-based mirroring. Everyone has a migration tool but no-one has tool which will do Lun-stacking automagically; by Lun-stacking, I mean the ability to take multiple luns, migrate and concatenate them at the same time.

For example, we've got a situation where we are beginning to hit against the DMP limits for the number of Luns; what would be really useful is to be able to migrate these smaller Luns onto larger Luns but merging them at the same time. We could migrate to larger Luns, then consolidate and then drop some of the Luns but that is a big, time consuming job. So guys, if you want your virtualisation tools to be really useful to me; make them do that!

Comments

[Andrew]

Howdy,

was there any mention of IP over FC?

:)

[Chris M Evans]

Martin

Unfortunately as I'm sure you're too well aware, the nirvana you're looking for requires more than an understanding of the block-based storage underlying your file system, but rather it needs a full understanding of the filesystem itself. It also needs an understanding of how the LUNs combine to comprise the filesystem. I think this is worthy of a post - I'll mull it over.

[Martin G]

Indeed there was mention of IP over FC :) Very brief and I guess it is something I need to do some reading on.

And Chris, of course I know it's really hard to do. If it was easy, someone would have done it! Now, I'm wondering if one of the RAIN based devices could do something as they are all generally based on Linux. Get Linux to mount the file-system (it can mount most file-systems these days) and in the background copy the files on the file-system to a new file-system on a new LUN; automagically re-present but you'd almost certainly need a server reboot to do it. It's a hack and makes all kinds of assumptions but I have suspicion if it is ever going to work, its going to have to be something like that approach.