HP And Brocade Team Up To Deliver Virtualization

Slated for general availability in the fourth quarter, HP's sales force will deliver a virtualization solution that takes HP's CASA virtualization appliance and marries it to Brocade's SilkWorm Fabric Application switch, says Mark Sorenson, HP's vice president of storage software.

The CASA (Continuous Access Storage Appliance) product -- which is primarily rooted in the StorageApps technology that HP acquired in July 2001, was introduced last November and currently is an in-band virtualization device. That means it has good replication and snapshot capabilities but does not scale enough to be considered an enterprise product.

CASA will be integrated with HP's VersaStor technology -- which HP inherited from Compaq Computer. VersaStor promises to be the elusive out-of-band virtualization technology that some find desirable because it does not contribute to latency within the network. Once CASA has both in-band and out-of-band virtualization, it will be used in tandem with Brocade's fabric application to make a complete solution in which data slated for replication will be routed in-band. Some processing and memory and APIs in the Brocade switch will be used to map tables so that any I/O coming from the host is intelligently routed toward storage. The switch becomes the intelligent traffic director.

This hybrid approach means the vast majority of data will travel out-of-band while the Brocade switch will intelligently route replicated data in-band through the CASA appliance. "So when the I/O goes through the Brocade switch, it has the smarts to say, 'This data is replication data and it goes through this path, toward the CASA appliance," says Sorenson. "And if it is not replicated data, it goes directly to the host."

When HP merged with Compaq, it found itself the owner of two virtualization products. HP had acquired their through the purchase of StorageApps. Compaq had been developing its VersaStor technology for more than two years before the acquisition. After the merger, HP engineers and marketing employees decided to blend the two technologies into one device, especially when they realized the replication capability in the VersaStor technology was going to take more time and money to complete.

With this solution, virtualization if being built right into the fabric of the network with the idea that SAN management applications can be developed to be hosted director in the fabric application platform. Does this mean HP believes that virtualization should exist solely in the network?

"I wouldn't use the word solely," says Sorenson. "We will continue to do technologies where it makes the most sense. If you look at virtualization today, we do it in the host through our Virtual Replicator product. We do it in the controller and, now, we do it in the network.

"We don't believe one solution fits all," he adds.