Hi, I'm Jack Norris, director of Virtualization Marketingfor EMC. And today I'm here to talk about managing network storage. And networkstorage is actually getting more complex in environments today. What we see isthe emergence of not only NAS, traditional NAS storage for file and print servicesover the network but we're seeing the emergence of CAS, content addressablestorage that's focused on compliance and securing data. We're also seeing theemergence of clustered file systems that provide high performance clusteredfile systems that spread data across devices for higher performance computing.
So the issue is how do you manage network storage? Each ofthese have special purpose management capabilities. But you need something thatmanages across heterogeneous environments within each of these and you alsoneed something that can manage across. And that's where global filevirtualization fits in. Because the issue here is scale. If you look at largeenvironments it's not unusual to have a billion or more files in theenvironment. So if you look at a solution that requires all of your clients toaccess the backend storage through a propriety appliance or switch it's nevergoing to scale to meet the needs of large enterprise environments dealing withthis complexity. Global file virtualization leverages the IP network. And whatyou have today is you have end users accessing storage. And with global filevirtualization you've got virtualization built into the fabric. And through theuse of a global name space you've got logical names for the end users to accessthis data so data can move without disrupting the way they access.
Now how does global file virtualization scale? Let's saywe're moving from file server one to file server eight. This one is full. Thisone has a lot of space. I can balance capacity this way. Well with global filevirtualization now the ports associated with that are in the virtualizationnetwork and any end user access now flows through this virtualization space. Itfilters the traffic. It only deals with the data that we're relocating and thenonce all the data is now on this file server access goes back through the IPnetwork.
So the issue today in managing network storage is how do youscale, how do you meet the needs of large growing enterprises that have complexnetwork storage environments. The answer is not a simple appliance or a simplenetwork switch to do virtualization. The answer is global file virtualization.
