Loved-up 'frictionless' EMC bods slide ScaleIO into VMware kernel

EMC is going to extend its ScaleIO serverSAN product to function as a VMware kernel module to speed it up, thereby "twinning" it with VSAN in terms of VMware and ESXi integration.

There is a new spirit of co-opetition and even co-operation inside the EMC federation these days after its CEO, Joe Tucci, openly admitted there had been too much competition between its members and their products.

One example of seeming product overlap is between ScaleIO – which aggregates lots of server's direct-attached storage (DAS) into a storage area network (SAN) – and VMware's VSAN, which also aggregates connected servers' DAS into a SAN.

VSAN goes up to 32 connected servers whereas ScaleIO goes up to 1,000s, EMC says.

According to LeMag IT, whose correspondent spoke to ScaleIO co-founder and MD Boaz Palgi, ScaleIO's software will be kernelised in the next release and move from being just another virtual machine to being a functioning part of the VMware kernel.

It will thereby get full vStorage APIs for Array Integration support, should operate faster and may need less DRAM. We may need to think of VSAN as a lightweight version of ScaleIO, or ScaleIO as a VSAN Plus product.

Another positioning problem will be around the firm at large trying to push a petabyte-scale ScaleIO SAN versus a petabyte-scale VMAX array, a petabyte-scale XtremIO array, and a petabyte-scale VSAN – an issue which will become even more acute if ScaleIO and VSAN servers have flash storage.

We expect EMC to carefully delineate the separate use cases so that the four products overlap as little as possible. ®