2012 has been the year of “software-defined datacenter“. Another buzzword? Perhaps, but nevertheless it captures a tectonic shift happening in the IT industry. As a colleague, William Earl, commented in a blog post earlier this year, the increasing power of low-cost servers is making it possible to replace specialized hardware with general-purpose servers plus software. That’s software that abstracts, pools together, and manages the different resources in datacenters. Virtualization has been doing this for CPU and memory for ages. 2012 has been the year of “software-defined networking” (SDN) – the concept is gaining momentum beyond the few big players (such as Google and Facebook) that use SDN ( Openflow specifically) in their datacenters for years now. The popularization of SDN is driven...
Christos Karamanolis
Sr. Staff Engineer, R&D
Biography
Christos has over 20 years of research and development experience in the fields of distributed systems, fault tolerance, storage and storage management. He joined VMware in 2005. He has worked on the ESX storage stack (NFS client and vSCSI filters) and Disaster Recovery (vSphere Replication). More recently, he is an architect behind a new distributed storage platform and VMware's new, policy-based storage management stack (S-PBM, VASA). Before VMware, Christos spent several years at HP Labs as a researcher and research manager working on new-generation storage products and before that he was an Assistant Professor at Imperial College, UK. He has co-authored more than 20 research papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and has 23 granted patents. He holds a PhD in Distributed Computing from Imperial College, University of London, UK.Posts by Christos Karamanolis
A Preview of Distributed Storage
VMware shared a technology preview of Distributed Storage at VMworld 2012 as part of our broader storage strategy . Steve Herrod described this technology as “virtual SAN” in his Day 1 keynote at VMworld. Distributed Storage (DS), currently under development by VMware engineers, is a distributed layer of software running natively as part of the ESX hypervisor. It aggregates the hosts’ local storage devices (SSD and HDD) and makes them appear as a single pool of storage shared across all hosts. In other words, we are doing with local storage what we have done in the past with CPU and memory – virtualize the physical resources of ESX hosts and turn them into pools that can be carved up and assigned...
