Storage has had the same model as networking

Storage has had the same model as networking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The operating system was a way to sell storage hardware at a premium price. Similar to the networking scenario, software is also the magic that allows OEMs to sell memory at a premium price. After all, the storage providers wrote their software on classic *NIX systems and sold them at bargain prices.

This was a huge opportunity for storage vendors, but very painful for customers simply because the vendors locked you into a proprietary platform; it was not allowed to scale the storage array with common hardware if needed. You had to buy a new storage array from your current vendor.This presented several scaling challenges, for example :

It was possible to deploy the storage array (raw capacity) with a low initial acquisition cost, but this would have a major problem: if the storage needs grew faster than expected (which was often the case), there would be there was no direct upgrade path and a very expensive new storage array had to be purchased. The /O requirements were particularly problematic; many companies have eventually chosen to build excessive reserves for this purpose;

There was no way to find the right size for what you needed back then. – Another important issue was sizing for networking as we often had to buy expensive racks only suitable for fiber equipment or filled their array and the only solution offered is another expensive monolithic storage array. These are the problems that VMware vSAN wants to solve.vSAN is a scalable, distributed storage platform designed to provide pooled storage within a VMware cluster.