Pat Gelsinger is the new CEO of EMC’s VMware subsidiary, and in his latest Professional Alert, Wikibon CTO and Co-Founder David Floyer presents a vision of how Gelsinger can create an IO-Centric, full-systems architecture with VMware as the operating system that integrates Flash with EMC storage architectures. This, Floyer writes in “Potential VMware Strategy to Integrate Flash and EMC Storage Architectures”, would promote EMC to the status of a full systems vendor running across multiple-vendors’ servers in the virtualized data center.

Floyer sees this as the best solution to the problem EMC faces of fully integrating NAND Flash storager with traditional EMC server arrays. And it builds on the vision Gelsinger has presented several times on The Cube of a future in which flash replaces high-speed disk drives in Tier 0 and Tier 1, with slower and less expensive SATA disk provides Tier 3 and possibly Tier 4 archiving as well. Wikibon agrees with that vision with the caveat that tape is probably going to remain as the off-site archiving/backup medium for many companies for the foreseeable future.

The issue for EMC in achieving that level of integration is that the alternatives have serious drawbacks. The flash-cache approach drives IO latency variance through the roof, while the idea that an array-based tiered storage manager such as EMC FAST can manage the entire stack is a non-starter – slow peripherals cannot manage fast processors.

The best approach for Gelsinger, Floyer writes, is to introduce EMC VFCache and VMware kernel APIs to drive a top-down data acceleration and management strategy. This would provide atomic write capabilities to the flash card and manage the metadata and full storage stack, enabling both transactional and analytic Big Data applications. APIs could integrate file and database systems into VMware and to the shared flash-only storage array layer based on EMC’s XtremIO acquisition.

Floyer admits that this approach has its own challenges, including the probability that EMC Symmetrix management will fight it and that EMC would need the cooperation of the leading database vendors, particularly Oracle and Microsoft. But it is by far the best overall solution, taking full advantage of the order-of-magnitude read/write greater speeds of flash and integrating the entire virtualized data center with VMware as the core operating system. It would also drive VMware further into the heart of enterprise data centers by making it vital for full integration of flash in the storage stack.

Like all Wikibon community research, this Professional Alert is available in its entirety without charge on the Wikibon.org Web site. Interested parties are invited to register on the Wikibon site, which allows them to read, correct, and comment on this and other Wikibon research as well as receive Wikibon’s Peer Incite announcements and newsletters.