ORIGINALLY POSTED 8th August 2009

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Seems like a lot of water, in the case of Farley and Burke – a lot of smack ups – but it feels like smack downs to me… 😉 has gone under the bridge.

Looking back at my first part work, some 24 months ago, it would look like Invista was still maybe being banded about as a ‘serious’ option, and many people were looking at the (now gone) Incipient, to back up EMC’s dumb decision to go out of band / packet cracking…

It may seem like an obvious decision now, but even though SVC had been out there for 4 years, some folks (EMC especially) were trying to say we’d got it wrong… who got what wrong now…. and who is still going from strength to strength, unlocking traditional vendor lock-in, and making heterogeneous SANs, and most importantly choice a reality.

For those that missed it here are the links to my 2007 part work, comparing and contrasting to the various approaches to Storage Virtualization.

I’ve had many comments and commendations for my subsequent, what is SVC post which is also linked below:

• 2009: What is SVC
• 2007 Part 1 – What do I mean by Storage Virtualization
• 2007 Part 2 – Copy Services
• 2007 Part 3 – Performance
• 2007 Part 4 – Interoperability
• 2007 Part 5 – Upgrades

I do find it interesting to look back. HDS don’t look to have taken any notice. You still have the WWNN and WWPN issues when you need to upgrade the monolith. Lots of Hitachi Maths have gone by since then, no box has been able to meet the hundreds of PB claims, and you still need to have down time to upgrade between monoliths. EMC have given up (we could have told you that 2 years ago) on Invista. Anyone that bought it and needs a product with a roadmap, come see IBM. Incipient have gone, what do we have left… SVC.

Not only that, but the precedent SVC set in 2003, using commodity Intel hardware to build a storage system – well, EMC Pespi-Max is using it too – so all that FUD they sold you about SVC.. If you’ve had enough, come see us and see how we can help break that chain, get you onto the real commodity path and stop paying for what you don’t need or use.