The use cases presented for file virtualization are: a way to scale existing NAS systems (to alleviate the “silo effect” that NAS has historically had), a migration engine for archiving, an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Distributed File System (DFS) and, most recently, an automated tiered storage engine and a bridge to the cloud. The point is raised that some customers might be hesitant to put a third-party appliance on top of their collection of high-end NAS systems, partly because a lot of NAS systems have addressed the silo effect. This may just mean that clustering high-end NAS boxes isn’t the best use case. What about the others? 

If you Google the terms “tiered storage,” “archiving,” “automated tiering” and “cloud storage,” it would seem that there are plenty of applications for file virtualization indeed. There has been some consolidation in this space, to be sure, but that’s understandable. The primary players in the space are doing well and are now emphasizing how this technology can provide more options to storage managers and add functionality to their existing infrastructure. These are appropriate messages for today.

File virtualization is a strong fit for VARs who can use this technology to consolidate a customer’s file storage and leverage its existing investments. As a technology, offered by an independent company, it’s ideal for integrating other products on your line card to complete the solution. Given the strength of NFS as a shared storage architecture for VM environments, file virtualization would be a natural play if you sell VMware. When you include integrating cloud storage, file virtualization looks even better as a technology for VARs.

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“The other thing that made me a throw up a little in the back of my throat was his use of the dread phrase “ILM” (information lifecycle management). I shudder when our marketing organization uses [the term ILM, because it] had such a huge hype curve that it was doomed to fail …” 

I think what’s interesting about this assessment of ILM is the emotion it evokes, something I’ve heard others essentially agree with. ILM did never live up to the attention that it was paid, mainly because the technology wasn’t there to make it work.

ILM and data lifecycle management were essentially warmed-over HSM discussions (remember HSM?). Where HSM provided disk and tape (remember “near-line”?), ILM added ATA drives to give you three tiers. Early on, StorageTek jumped on the ILM concept and came out with its BladeStore product, a Parallel ATA drive array that had more than few problems. Also, there really wasn’t any new software to do the most important part, moving the data between these “buckets,” or tiers. We used to call it “teared storage” because of the pain involved in trying to implement it.

So why the history lesson? One of the reasons people listened to the hype in the first place was that it made sense. Like HSM before it, ILM promoted a sound concept: storage optimization. Everyone may hate ILM as a term, but the practice of optimizing storage is very viable. What’s exciting now, especially for VARs, is that the technology for making a multitiered storage environment work is in place.

Where ILM had only early-generation ATA drives and tape to add to the existing Fibre Channel storage infrastructure, we’ve now got a lot more. On the hardware side, we have real differentiation among tiers, with SSD on the performance end and enormous SATA drives on the capacity end. When we add thin provisioning to the higher end and dedupe to the lower end, power management improves across the board — and for a lot of applications, tape can be replaced. On the software side, file virtualization does what HSM could not, really enabling the entire system.

Again, why dig all this up? Because there’s an opportunity here. Talk storage optimization. Bring in the appropriate hardware tiers, find a good file virtualization vendor and solve some problems for your customers — just don’t call it ILM.

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Old data is like old age: It happens to us all, and we need to plan for it. When primary, or active, storage systems are designed, ‘retirement” capacity for the data that lives on these systems should be included. Just buying more storage to meet an immediate need is fiscally irresponsible and leads to more costs down the road. Like the regulations in Europe that require the purchaser of a product to effectively pay for its disposal, the concept of planning for an asset’s lifecycle before its acquisition is a valid one, regardless of one’s personal philosophy about recycling.

When you think about it, many of the issues IT faces around storage are brought about by increasing the capacity of active data storage; things like backup, management, power, floor space, etc. Data retirement could help this by clearing data out of active storage and minimizing the amount of this capacity that’s needed. When selling primary storage, be sure to complete the system by discussing the technology options for retiring that data. For example:

File virtualization can enable efficient migration of data from existing active storage to retirement. Put in an appliance to virtualize file storage, and move an old NAS to the “retirement tier.”

More traditional data archiving solutions — from a number of vendors, including the primary disk suppliers — can also be implemented. The point is to include a solution for storing data as its access requirements diminish. Besides giving you the opportunity to show another product, it shows the customer you’re looking at the big picture.

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File virtualization, like block storage virtualization, abstracts the users from the physical storage by inserting a logical layer between clients and file servers. It presents users with a single logical mount point regardless of the physical location of the file. This abstraction allows a file system to be spread across several physical file servers and provides a number of benefits, which address many of the issues NAS users have historically faced.

The technology lets storage administrators expand storage arrays, do routine maintenance, consolidate file servers or even buy storage from different vendors, all transparently to the end user. Some virtualization systems can also migrate files to lower tiers of storage, automatically, enabling significant cost savings. These new tiers can even be “in the cloud” and physically located almost anywhere.

There are a number of scalable NAS solutions on the market available from newer players, as well as from major disk manufacturers, offering a virtualized file environment that includes disk capacity. However, a different implementation of this technology, which is probably of more interest to storage VARs and integrators, is with a storage-agnostic virtualization appliance.

These appliances are either in-band, where the files actually pass through the virtualization device, or out-of-band, where just the file metadata touches the virtualization device. There a number of companies offering storage-independent file virtualization appliances, including F5 Networks and EMC (with Rainfinity), and AutoVirt has a file virtualization software product.

Like block storage virtualization, file virtualization is an enabling technology — one that enables VARs to get into new accounts. With these products, you can talk with NAS users who are sick of paying Tier 1 disk prices to store Tier 3 data and who want to look at a commodity NAS supplier or a cloud solution. You can go see users who want to break away from their NAS “silo” architecture and add capacity when needed, without buying an entire new NAS array. Virtualization is a natural VAR/integrator play and one that can open a lot of doors.

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