Storage News

EMC's Storage Federation Vision

Pat Gelsinger, EMC president and COO, offers a look at EMC's vision of global storage federation. According to this report on PC World, global storage federation will allow companies to overcome latency and bandwidth problems to keep their data in sync over large distances.

"Gelsinger: By analogy, if you think about what we've done with virtualization for servers, first you're able to consolidate multiple servers on a single piece of hardware and that brought a lot of efficiency. Secondly, you're able to group servers together with things like VMotion and distributed resource scheduling (DRS) is allowed, and you have these pools of resources. To move virtual machines (VMs) over long distances you've been bound by physical storage, because you can't shove a terabyte across the wire and have this flexibility.

"What we're trying to do in our overall vision for virtual storage is to mimic what we've done with servers for storage. The first part is to collapse multiple frames and tiers of storage into a single device. The second part is to create federation, which means being able to take pools of storage frames and treat them like one, so we create more agility for the storage subsystem free from the physical storage environment. But the big concept that we laid out is what we call geofederation, this ability to cache across distance large frames of storage. As long as storage follows the 80-20 rule -- a little bit gets used a lot -- we have the core technology that allows us to share data at great distances. We believe this will be a fundamental enabling technology for entirely new models and usage of computing."