By Ann Ernst
published: Wednesday, December 15 2004
Troika Networks provides flexible SAN-based storage management solutions. Together with StoreAge Networking Technologies they recently announced the availability of a storage virtualization and data protection solution for VMware ESX Server installations. VSM spoke to Steve O'Brian, Troika VP of Marketing and Ben Kuo, a Senior Product Manager at Troika.
VSM: Could you introduce yourselves, and talk a little about the company and what you do?
BK: I’m a Senior Product Manager at Troika. I manage our storage management solution products covering both inbound and outbound marketing – telling people about our product – as well as the product management - what features are going into the product and when.
SO: I am the VP of Marketing, I’ve got the marketing organization, inbound and outbound.
Troika provides network-based data protection and management solutions. We also offer purpose-built network-based platforms on which 3rd party applications can be added.
We have found a strong need for our solutions in mid-enterprise environments, including customers looking to bridge storage and server virtualization. We have a lot of customers with VMware ESX Server environments, and it’s been a very good fit for our technology.
BK: Are you familiar with the intelligent networks, intelligent switch discussions that have been going on?
VSM: Yes, because virtualization is now a buzzword in the industry. It seems you’ve been a storage company, and now you’re including server virtualization. Why is that?
SO: It isn’t a switch-over, it’s really a complementary play. A few years back, storage virtualization was a big thing, so that technology has been around. It matches up very well with the new interest in server virtualization. It’s not something brand new, it’s just that there’s now enough technology in the area that doing both of them together seems to make a lot of sense.
VSM: Are you hearing from customers that they already have storage virtualization, and that now as they are moving to server virtualization they are interested in combining the two?
BK: We see a little bit of both. They either have implemented storage virtualization and now they see server virtualization is getting hot and they want to look at it, or they have adopted server virtualization and see that right now the storage management available is fairly primitive for a product like ESX Server. They see that the same kind of technology is available on the storage side.
SO: The things that drive server virtualization in the customer environment vs. the factors that drive a customer to seek out storage virtualization sometimes are the same. But sometimes they incorporate virtualization on different projects for various reasons. Then they’re sitting with a storage virtualization environment on one side of the building and a server virtualization environment for something else, and they see that those two technologies belong together.
VSM: What do you see as the primary business drivers that would differ?
BK: People are getting too many small servers, underutilized CPUs, too many specialized servers, and this all leads them to server virtualization. Because of these issues, people are adopting VMware ESX Server in droves.
One of the drivers for storage virtualization is that as you start to do all the server virtualization, you really need a lot more storage. It used to be when you had individual servers, you would do captive disk, with whatever disk was installed inside their server.
All of a sudden you have all these DSK files, or your virtual infrastructure storage, that has to be given to one server, or many servers, or a farm of servers. A lot more capacity is required, and there’s a lot more load, both performance and backup, on those virtualized servers.
SO: One of the reasons that customers move to storage virtualization is from a management perspective, being able to provision storage instead of having to deal with provisioning on a storage array by storage array basis. Virtualization simplifies that whole process and allows customers more flexibility with tighter increments of how they provision storage. It manages volumes as one big universal storage device vs. a bunch of independent storage devices.
BK: Right now storage provisioning is a lot like server provisioning, which is a lot of manual operations. For every storage array you have to set up LUNs, it takes a lot of work, and it’s very complex. In fact, some companies even recommend you call a service technician to help you do that.
When you put storage virtualization into the mix, it makes it much easier. It’s just a console, it’s some software, where they can click and pick how many terabytes of storage and it appears on the network.
Another aspect is data protection. A lot of customers are adding storage virtualization as one of the enablers to do better data protection. For example, one thing that comes along with the integrated solution that we offer, beyond just the virtualization function, is features like snapshot and mirroring capabilities, to be able to improve data availability.
SO: For example, the easy case that’s often used in the industry is that customers might have something like an EMC Symmetrix storage array for their primary storage. They may not want to use a very expensive array for secondary storage, backups and mirrors. They may rather want to leverage a heterogeneous storage environment instead.
A virtualized environment enables customers to choose a greater breadth of storage resource options. Customers are able to use storage from HP or from any other source alongside their storage from EMC. Tiered storage relates to this as well, because it allows customers to essentially tie the type of storage they use to the value of the data being put onto those devices. So storage virtualization becomes one of the principal enablers for some of the more advanced data protection applications that are starting to emerge.
VSM: And with Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, that’s very important.
SO: Exactly. That’s driving the need for not only better data protection, but for more storage in general. And that goes back to the complexity issue of provisioning.
VSM: Can you talk about the value proposition of the product?
SO: This goes back to the whole model that storage virtualization is trying to solve, and that is that you’re developing very heterogeneous storage environments. Customers have lots of different brands and types of storage now, customers have lots of different types of SANs, different types of vendors of SANs, and certainly lots of different operating environments that they’re ultimately trying to connect into this.
What customers are seeking is the ability to simplify this mess. They seek a common point of control for managing and data protection across a variety of storage resources. Also they seek the flexibility of being able to choose the best of breed devices to match their needs. That is the value proposition of Troika network-based solutions.
So to the question of some customers starting with storage virtualization and migrating to server virtualization and vice versa, certainly that is happening. But some customers are just having problems making all these little islands of applications and environments actually work together. That’s probably one of the longer-term issues on people’s minds.
Things like vendor lock-in and the manual management of environments these drive, certainly are playing a role. As well as things like Sarbanes-Oxley just demanding greater and greater functionality, which forces more pressure onto the system in general. It’s a simplification effort that is driving customer needs in a lot of these areas.
Essentially what we’re doing with our model is to deliver different types of storage services, such as mirroring, snapshot and virtualization, and we’re deploying those into a network-based model. So our device physically looks like a fabric switch, but it really is an application hosting platform.
This device can be connected into a single SAN, or five SANs, or across the environment, and it allows the application to be able to see into those various storage environments and extend the functionality that the application is meant to serve.
VSM: Is this Fibre Channel only?
SO: The product that we provide today is Fibre Channel SAN, correct. But we will be supporting iSCSI in the near future.
Part of our value proposition is that a customer can use our product with any type of storage or servers or switches, which is a major concern on customers’ minds. They want to be able to apply these types of functionality to these various environments. It’s a very cost-effective way of delivering the solution because we have now centralized the application.
Today the way many storage virtualization products work is that they are actually deployed out on the host themselves, so you have a very distributed model of functionality. It’s complex because customers have to maintain all these various server agents, and they don’t care for that. The other aspect is the performance implications, that those agents absorb processing power and make the servers run a little slower.
It’s a particularly big issue in a VMware environment because you have a physical server with a bunch of virtual servers. From an agent-based approach, that’s very complex for a virtualization solution to run in an agent mode on a virtualized server environment.
By pulling all of this functionality into a single location on our product, we simplify the whole distribution model of how virtualization works.
VSM: It’s interesting that we’re going back to a centralized model.
SO: It is. As time goes on, it makes sense for certain functions to be distributed, and for other functions to be more centralized. Especially in data protection and virtualization types of functions, moving into the network makes a lot of sense because you have pretty much everything connected into it, and by centralizing it you simplify the upkeep and deployment of it.
VSM: How is the system performance?
SO: A big value proposition that we bring to the table is that we actually accelerate these applications. On our product we have a purpose-built ASIC that speeds up the application itself. We perform the mirroring, virtualization and snapshot functionalities in hardware, vs. running it on a server that would run it in a general use processor. We can provide much greater throughput and much greater performance, and as a result the overall solution is much more scalable. You can hook in a lot more servers, a lot more storage, and provision a much larger environment.
That’s our core value proposition: making things simpler, centralizing the functions, and providing much greater performance and scalability.
We’ve found the delivery model to be very compelling, especially as virtualization has moved to this next-generation delivery in terms of the network. The partner we’ve got today in storage offers an agent-based delivery approach, and with us added to it, it has become a much more compelling product.
Because we are a technology company in terms of purpose-built hardware, there are a couple of different ways that our products show up in the marketplace. The network-based integrated solutions area is where we take a software application such as StoreAge, integrate it into our product and add things like VMware support, and then deliver that solution to the marketplace.
We also provide the platform itself, and the underlying technology that is associated with it, to storage OEMs primarily, for them to integrate into their own solutions. There’s a “Troika undercover” side of our business, as well as Troika branded solutions.
VSM: So you’re seeing big demand for the use of this technology?
SO: Yes. The technology itself is certainly going to be a key enabler for these applications on a couple of fronts. One dimension is that applications are becoming more sophisticated and much more powerful, thus they’re requiring a lot more processing power. Then the delivery mechanism itself, being able to put it into a hardware device that can reside within a storage array or a network but act as a network-type device, is very appealing.
VSM: What does the console show the user?
BK: Currently our solution provides a Web-based GUI that allows you to see all the storage resources. Since we are a member of the VMware Software Alliance, we’ve been working with their SDK for some future features. Right now it allows you to put up a side-by-side window, one to the VMware MUI management interface, and one to our storage virtualization interface.
VSM: Wouldn’t it be great to have a management console like this and VirtualCenter combined?
SO: Exactly. The end users who have worked with our solution love it, because they can use one screen to manage everything. The power of that is if they decide they want to create a new server they click, do all the things they need to do in VMware, then they click over to a different window and create some storage for it, and you have everything that you need.
VSM: When you talk about instant provisioning of storage, is it similar to the way a server is provisioned in VMware?
SO: Absolutely. Basically you say how much storage you want, whether or not you want data protection, whether you want it to be mirrored, and you assign it to those VMware servers you want it to have access to. All at the console.
VSM: Are you working on a way to show all of the resources?
SO: We can’t talk too much about that, but we are working toward better integration with VMware.
VSM: Who are your competitors?
SO: There are different competitors in different areas. When it comes to the VMware solution, today we really don’t have a competitor. This is the only storage virtualization offering today in a VMware environment. We would certainly anticipate something from companies like EMC, who has made an announcement that at some point they will be furnishing types of technology such as this. But we believe we’ve got a very decent head start on everybody else. At least for the foreseeable future, the next 6-12 months, we would expect to be the offering in this particular space.
There are a lot of people who offer generic solutions for storage virtualization, but we found that we’re focusing quite a bit on the VMware user specifically. I don’t think you’ll find any other companies who have decided this is one of the areas they’d like to enhance.
VSM: The product plays well with VMotion?
BK: Yes it does. At VMworld we showed a demonstration of running VirtualCenter and running VMotion of servers across our storage. We’re VMotioning things back and forth between two ESX server machines.
VSM: Server virtualization is being used now as part of some business continuity and disaster recovery programs. Combining server and storage virtualization should lower the cost of implementing a plan, making implementation possible for more companies.
BK: At VMworld VMware talked about an idea they call N+1. Their idea is that you create a disaster recovery site using ESX server, so that you don’t need as much server hardware for your disaster recovery site. Storage virtualization works into that as well, because you can create a disaster recovery site with cheaper storage. By combining them you really do get a lot more bang for your buck.
The option right now, if you were not using storage virtualization, is that you would need two very expensive arrays on either side, or many expensive arrays. The virtualization makes it possible to mix and match the tiered storage.
SO: On the storage DR side, that started as a very high-end solution. From an affordability standpoint, it was something that everybody sought but only the biggest companies could go after full-tilt. In the last few years many companies in the mid-market have been targeted for the DR and business continuance solutions, because they’ve been the area of the market that’s been underserved.
The concept of storage virtualization is huge for that marketplace because they typically have different kinds of storage, and can’t afford the EMC SRDF kinds of applications that would be provided in more of a proprietary, closed environment.
VSM: Where do you think virtualization technologies will be going over the next few years?
SO: Storage virtualization concepts five years ago were making a big splash. Like a lot of things, the hype was a little more than was deliverable. In the last couple of years people have been questioning whether it is going to be one of those technologies that makes a big splash or not.
In the last year, storage virtualization has made a big comeback. It’s now being viewed not as a solution in itself, or the end game, but as an enabling function for lots of other things. For example, ILM is one of the big new concepts that are capturing attention, and virtualization will play a huge enabling role in making tiered storage and ILM functionality real.
Virtualization has a very positive association now with other capabilities, including business continuance and other types of data protection solutions. But in itself, the storage virtualization market, people who just want to virtualize storage for the sake of doing so, certainly is not the primary focus of our company or most people in the industry.
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Find out more about Troika Networks at www.troikanetworks.com
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