VMware Playing a New Role in Storage

By Frank Berry
published: Thursday, June 04 2009

In this gloomy economic climate, virtualization is one of the few IT markets that are enjoying healthy growth. CFOs are stamping their approval on budgets for virtualization technology because it increases utilization of IT resources and cuts costs. According to Gartner, the penetration of virtualization technology hit 20 percent this year, almost doubling the 12 percent achieved last year.

The undisputed leader in this fast growing market is VMware and the company name has become synonymous with "server" virtualization. But I'm convinced the VMware brand is going to mean a whole lot more in the near future because a rising star for virtualization and the VMware platform is "storage" virtualization.

To provide some insight into the game changing emergence of VMware as a major force in the storage industry, I'm providing analysis of my interviews with the company in an 8-part series starting with this article about storage industry dynamics and VMware's storage strategy.

Storage Industry Dynamics - Plate Tectonics

In the field of Geology, tectonics describes the large scale dynamics of plates that form the Earth's mantle. These gigantic plates slowly move about 40mm per year (about as fast as fingernails grow) to about 160mm per year (about as fast as hair grows). Even the slightest movements of these colossal sections of the Earth's crust have the potential to cause cataclysmic disruptions such as earthquakes and volcanoes. And when two of these massive plates slide towards each other - one plate is slowly moved underneath the other.

The storage industry has plate tectonics of its own. Storage professionals can almost feel the rumbling of an earthquake rocking the industry as the powerful VMware plate grinds against a hundred small start-ups and the mammoth OEMs - each trying to avoid being moved underneath each other.

In the end small storage management vendors will be pushed underneath larger vendors, as products such as backup, replication and deduplication, that today meet only some of the requirements in the management stack, become features of broader solutions.  And in the years ahead, I expect VMware to transform how IT professionals look at deploying and managing storage, which has profound implications on what storage hardware vendors and storage software vendors need to do to add value to customers.

You might expect an atmosphere of hostility to develop between VMware and the ecosystem of vendors anticipating the company's growing role in storage. However, what I found is VMware executing on its strategies while at the same time successfully cultivating strong relationships with storage OEMs like HP, operating system vendors such as Red Hat and independent storage software vendors like Symantec.

VMware Goals & Strategies - Storage Next on the List to Conquer

VMware did not define for me a set of formal goals. But reading between the lines, I see the company has one goal that is massively encompassing and elegantly simple:

Be the world's best platform for managing virtual servers, storage, networking, applications and other key information technologies that end users want to pool and share in the future.

Perfectly aligned with their goal, VMware has penciled in storage next on the list of IT resources to optimize for a virtualized data center environment. Global 2000 IT professionals now clearly understand the benefits of leaping from connecting servers with a network to server virtualization.  It's intuitive to these IT professionals that leaping from connecting storage on a SAN to a broader storage virtualization platform is, or should be, on the horizon.

Again, VMware did not define for me a formal set of storage strategies. My interpretation of our discussion is that today the company is focused on three strategies for serving the storage market:

Make storage a primary consideration for an architecture with virtualization - Architects in the 20% of companies that have deployed virtualized environments more often than not position VMware at the heart of their future data center designs.  These architects are making sure that new server deployments take into account which storage products work best with VMware.  Fortunately, vendors have taken note and in just a few years have made sure a vast ecosystem of products is highly interoperable with VMware.  In addition the company's marketing machine is expanding their messaging to make storage a priority.

Ensure deep integration of storage management with the virtualization platform - Making storage a primary consideration makes for happier customers and creates opportunity for VMware.  After years of development providing basic I/O and a few storage apps, its crystal clear to VMware and customers that integration of storage management with the virtualization platform will make the environment more reliable and perform better.  I expect VMware to deliver the best available integration by combining both VMware innovation and value related to storage management.

Tailor virtual storage for Enterprise and SMB - Enterprise IT is typically entrenched in complex storage architectures and long term software licensing.  These shops want VMware to help them integrate their existing storage management applications with VMware server virtualization.  Conversely, a high priority for SMBs is simplicity.   One way to do that is to consolidate IT resources with virtualization technology.  Another way to accomplish that goal is to consolidate vendors.  VMware is helping SMBs on both fronts by integrating storage management with the virtualization platform.

In summary, storage management is a necessary part of future virtualization platforms and VMware has the will and resources to lead.  Furthermore, I see strong demand from customers for VMware to provide storage management that works better and is easier to use because it's integrated into the platform.

Next week in part two of this series we'll look at the features and benefits of VMware's storage functionality.

ITBrand Pulse, VMware