The product will not only be EMC’s answer to IBM’s SAN Volume Controller, and Hitachi’s Lightning TagmaStore. It will also be the first application to fully exploit Brocade’s Rhapsody-inspired smart switch, and will be the first tier-one vendor’s implementation of smart switch application hosting not to be hobbled by limited market access.
The smart switch-based system was first unveiled by EMC just over two years ago. Yesterday the company said it will ship in the third quarter, running on both Brocade and Cisco hardware, with a version based on McData gear to ship in 2006. EMC said a base Invista configuration that can handle at least 64TB of data will carry a list price of $225,000 including all hardware and software, although it did not say whether that would involve Cisco or Brocade gear.
That price puts the device firmly in the high-end market alongside Hitachi’s six-figure price tag TagmaStore, and does not give it the same range as IBM’s SVC. The SVC can be scaled to sixteen processors, and has a list starting price of $40,000 for two processors. But EMC claims that Invista will be 30% cheaper than the SVC in like-for-like configurations, because unlike IBM, EMC will not add a per-TB charge to the base price. IBM confirmed this extra charge for every TB virtualized by an SVC, without confirming or denying EMC’s 30% claim.
As already highlighted by ComputerWire, when it first ships Invista will offer only data migration functions, unlike the SVC, TagmaStore and other virtualization products that offer both migration and DR-style replication functions.
But EMC said that probably early next year it will add those replication functions to the Invista. These are usually completed by expensive array-based software, an area that has underpinned much of EMC’s success in the past. EMC said Invista owners will be able to continue using that array software. We fully expect DP functions to be requested at all three layers arrays, network virtualization systems, and host servers, said EMC vice president Todd Oseth.
Migration is the most appealing facility of v-word systems, but is closely followed by the ability for DR-style replication, especially between heterogeneous arrays, said ESG analyst Nancy Hurley. It’s going to be very important for EMC to add those replication functions, and quickly, she said.
IDC analyst Rick Villars took the same view. Given that the initial focus for most early potential buyers of Invista will be data migration, remote replication isn’t an immediate need. But IDC expects this to be a growing requirement beyond the 6 month mark, he said.
Anyone expecting Invista to ship just a little earlier than the third quarter had mistakenly confused the words shipping and available, EMC explained. The plan was always to have it available at the end of Q2. That means it will ship in the third quarter, said Oseth.
The virtualization market is still very much in its early stages, and even its current run-away leader IBM has only scored 1,000 implementations for its SVC product. But EMC still appeared a little defensive about its relatively late entry when it argued that it took the necessary time to work up what will be only the second application from a tier-one vendor to run on a smart SAN switch.
EMC repeated previous arguments about the merits of hosting virtualization software on a smart switch, highlighting among other things the fact that Invista will involve no cache, and will be stateless, so that it will not be burdened with or made vulnerable by the need to keep multiple copies of data synchronized.
But nobody yet knows where virtualization software is best run on a clustered appliance IBM-style, an array controller Hitachi-style, or on a smart switch EMC-style according to Hurley and Villars.
There aren’t enough proof-points right now to say one is better than another. Latency effects have not been a problem for appliance-based systems the way people thought they would, Hurley said.
This issue is unsettled at present. For most companies, the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of all three approaches are just that theoretical, Villars said.
But Hurley said that a recent ESG survey found that in the short term, customers will see appliance-based systems as a less disruptive way of moving into virtualization. But in the long term they may find the integration of virtualization and switching more cost-effective, she said.
Invista will not be the first tier-one vendor’s software to be hosted on a smart switch, as Veritas launched its Cisco switch-based VSFN virtualization product in April last year. But by April this year VSFN had scored zero production implementations. One major reason for this is that VSFN was not offered by any of the large storage OEMs EMC, IBM, HP and Hitachi which are responsible for the vast majority of high-end SAN and storage gear sales.
IBM’s SVC can be hosted in Cisco’s MDS 9000 smart SAN switch, but does not involve port-level processing and so does not count as a smart switch implementation.
EMC said Invista will support the most prevalent IBM, HP, and Hitachi arrays out of the gate, alongside a major spread of host operating systems.
