Many years ago I remember a shall-remain-nameless company showing up at the door of my former employer to discuss some vaporware technology they were in the process of building. This technology would "virtualize" storage by adding another layer on top of the physical SAN. That layer would be able to do hot data migrations between disparate SAN's, near-instant storage provisioning, data snapshotting that enables zero-time backup windows, and a whole host of other capabilities that no one in the room really believed possible.

Silly us. We sent that company on it's way.

Having gotten out of SAN administration for a while now, I picked up this week's InfoWorld and noticed that those very same features are now out of the vaporware phase and fully in production. It is truly possible to migrate full data volumes from one SAN to another with no downtime due to point-in-time snapshotting as well as eliminating backup windows using the same technology.

What's truly interesting is that this technology is eeking out of the Tier 3 SAN providers into those at a much lower cost. If the idea of a Fibre Channel SAN freaks out your budget, you can now get some of the very same features within a significantly cheaper iSCSI-based SAN as well.

The InfoWorld article is worth a read at: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/12/07FEvirtualstor_1.html

Peaking my interest, I attended a seminar by one of the lower-cost iSCSI SAN providers, Left Hand Networks, on their ability to do the features mentioned above. Pretty impressive, and at a much lower cost than FC SAN's. Interestingly enough, the person running the webinar also told me that with enough NIC teaming iSCSI SAN's could reach the same speed as those using Fibre Channel.

Left Hand will be re-running their presentation tomorrow, 2/21, on iSCSI SAN's and how storage virtualization and server virtualization relate. Check it out at: http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/cmp.php?cid=36&rid=LFTHND-01&h=53&m=1&cook=1