In-Depth
Video: Storage Virtulaization and DataCore (Interview)
Ziya Aral, CTO and co-founder of storage virtualization software vendor DataCore Software, offers an unconventional analysis of server and storage virtualization.
Ziya Aral, CTO and co-founder of Ft. Lauderdale, FL-based storage virtualization software vendor, DataCore Software, offers an analysis of server and storage virtualization that blows the socks off of the marketspeak one usually hears or reads from industry analysts and vendors. That's because he has been part of the evolution of the technology over the past three decades.
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Says Aral, in this interview recorded for the C-4 Summit Cyberspace Edition, virtualization was -- and is -- inevitable. He notes that embedding software on hardware became a costly and inefficient design choice years ago -- especially as hardware architecture became more standardized. Software complexity required its migration to a computer so it could be maintained and improved without requiring the costly replacement of the underlying hardware platform.
He argues that DataCore's key innovation was to conceive of the "storage application" as any other computer application, separating it from the storage hardware layer -- the costly and complex value-add array controller. The benefits of such abstracting storage services into a virtualization layer would be to deliver a rich set of services that could be applied across hardware without concern for the vendor badging of the hardware itself. Software and hardware could scale independently.
Performance and management also improve with virtualization, Aral notes, citing the success of DataCore customers for proof. To hear the rest of Aral's fascinating analysis, check out the C-4 Project (www.c4project.org), where Aral is part of an on-going "summit in cyberspace."
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this link to play the video.