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EMC Lays Down The Virtual Storage Gauntlet: Page 3 of 3

My Take
Recall the famous query of Benjamin Franklin, "Of what use is a new born baby?" Well, with virtual storage, in the sense of EMC's first appliance-form instantiation, we have a little bit of a wait before its first delivery. Yes, that "baby" will have a lot of potential, but it is unfair at this early stage to have unrealistic expectations as to when that potential will be fulfilled. Virtual storage needs to be given the breathing room and time to mature.

That said, EMC's initial vision of virtual storage is block-based (which is fine), but it obviously needs to be connected to the file-based world. That connection is critical if virtual storage is to realize its full potential. As it stands now, virtual storage deals with data, not with information, and a fine-grained knowledge of information is required to enable a full range of policies to be applied. Mr. Gelsinger confirmed that will happen at some point in the future, and it does not need to be available day one as a great deal can be accomplished using block-based storage alone.

All that said, we believe EMC's virtual storage baby is likely to be beautiful and much can be done and accomplished before file and deep information knowledge is added in. Overall, EMC should be given a great deal of credit for directly addressing the critical issue of distributed cache coherency and being able to promulgate initial virtual storage solutions which moves us closer to the private cloud. Overall, it will be fun to explore all the implications, ramifications and competitive reactions as virtual storage grows from infancy to adulthood.