UPDATED 14:57 EDT / OCTOBER 03 2012

QLogic Focuses on Flash and Cloud Storage Integration Says Rob Davis

QLogic logo“I’m in the futures business, and we’re focused on cloud and flash,” QLogic CTO Rob Davis told SiliconAngle Founder John Furrier and Wikibon Co-Founder David Vellante in the Cube in the QLogic booth at Oracle OpenWorld on October 3, 2012.

Qlogic’s flash product, of course, is Mt. Rainier, detailed in a Professional Alert posted recently by Wikibon Network Analyst Stuart Miniman. “When you put a solid-state disk card on a server, you lose all the SAN aspects of the card and go back to the early days of DAS,” he said. That means that the card, while an order-of-magnitude faster in data access than a spinning disk, can only be used by the server it is attached to. “What Mt. Rainier does is add the IO interface to that flash store. That gives you all the aspects of a SAN.”

Specifically, in a large data center with flash cards plugged into multiple servers, Mt. Rainier can create a virtual SAN over the internal network, allowing all servers and applications to use all the flash cards regardless of their physical position. It can integrate this flash into the traditional physical SAN, with its large arrays of high-capacity disk drives, creating a very high speed top tier in the storage infrastructure. That gives the company a lot more utilization for its investment.

In the area of cloud, he said, QLogic is working on a solution to integrate cloud storage with internal enterprise storage. “We think cloud storage [on Infrastructure-as-a-Service systems from providers like Yahoo, Google, and Amazon] have a big future. But there is a huge gap between them and traditional enterprise storage systems.”

This gap is both technological – today they work in isolation from each other so that data cannot travel easily, much less automatically, between them – and in mindset. Internal storage administrators are focused on availability and performance, whereas when companies use cloud storage they are focused on huge capacity, in the case of Big Data in particular, and low cost.

“It is a distance issue, a latency issue, and a mindset issue,” he said. “It’s like putting a watermelon through a straw and getting a watermelon out at the other end.”

QLogic is already putting products into that space, and it sees a big future for itself if it can solve the issues involved so that cloud storage essentially could become another tier in a unified storage infrastructure with integrated SSDs running through Mt. Rainier as the top tier and traditional disk-based or integrated flash/disk storage racks on a traditional internal SAN in the middle.

All of this fits nicely into Oracle’s increasing hardware/software integration. That, he said, was very much in evidence at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld. Whereas a year ago Oracle software might be running in demos on servers and storage from a variety of hardware vendors such as HP and EMC, this year, “you see a lot more Sparc and Solaris [from Oracle subsidiary Sun MicroSystems] everywhere. That is very different from last year.”

QLogic’s play into this increasingly integrated infrastructure is to provide systems that increase the performance of Oracle databases at the hot end and provide connections to less expensive storage both at the bottom tier and for data backup and disaster recovery, test and dev database copies, and similar environments where absolute performance is not the main issue. Mt. Rainier is QLogic’s answer for the first, and it hopes its cloud storage integration development project will provide the latter.

“Flash will have a huge impact,” Davis predicts. “Flash has no moving parts and is much faster than spinning disk. So you can totally rethink how you design computers. For 50 years computers have been designed around the limitations of disk storage. Flash removes those limitations. That’s where Mt. Rainier fits in.”


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU