Rise of the storage hypervisor

The storage hypervisor: Virtualization is about more than the server

David Davis, Contributor

ADVERTISEMENT   Get answers to all your channel questions on ITKnowledgeExchange.com Get answers to your vendor, managed services, product evaluation and vendor support questions today. View all the latest channel related questions and answers. Ask your IT questions today and get answers from your peers. View all channel related questions recently answered by the IT Knowledge Exchange community.

When people think about storage, they think expensive hardware - NAS arrays or massive SANs with disk arrays, switches, fibre channel (FC) cables and host bus adapters. But what NAS and SAN have in common is a level of intelligence in the storage target that communicates with all the hosts. That storage intelligence is really just software running on a dedicated computer inside the array, which could certainly be virtualized and used in a storage hypervisor. 
READ THIS EXPERT TIP. 


Network-as-a-Service could become a reality with OpenFlow
Buyers are already sold on Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service, but what about Network-as-a-Service? Despite the fact that the cloud is created in and connected through the network, we hear little or nothing about a new network paradigm for the cloud. Network-as-a-service is not only real, but it is likely to become universal. However, it may take software-defined networking (SDN) in the form of OpenFlow to make that happen. 
READ THIS EXPERT TIP. 


Cisco software-defined networking: OpenFlow alone will not cut it
OpenFlow will only play a small role in the Cisco software-defined networking strategy. Instead, Cisco will focus on making existing networks more programmable by opening up IOS and NX-OS for third-party development. Also, Cisco will apparently not replace distributed protocols and forwarding with an abstracted centralized OpenFlow control plane. 
READ THIS NEWS STORY.