The concepts of abstraction, pooling, automation and therefore the full virtualization of the network is what SDN is all about. While the biggest impact will surely be in the normal domain of networking people think of first, there will also be an impact to the domain of storage networks.
In my experience with service providers, ethernet-connected storage models (iSCSI, NFS, and object storage models) dominate. There’s a lot of interest in using VXLAN termination on storage targets in conjunction with software-defined end-to-end topologies to define “tenant storage networks”.
This is something we’re doing a lot of work on – across the EMC portfolio. This is just one demonstration using a “next generation VMAX prototype (with some crazy stuff we can’t really talk about yet, but the smart folks might infer looking closely at the demo) and NSX – really cool! This AD project is code-named “Project Alta” – demo below:
You can download the high-rez version of this video here!
For the folks at VMworld that want to see the same idea using VNX NAS, you can see it at the Brocade booth using a Brocade VDX.
We did another similar demo (using Nicira pre-NSX, same idea though) with VPLEX here.
I would expect all sorts of creative “mash-ups” of these two ideas going forward, they will be like peanut butter and jam :-)
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