Yesterday, Gluster introduced its first scale-out NAS virtual appliance for VMware and Amazon Web Services.  And after their announcement, I had the pleasure of being able to speak with the company's co-founder and CTO, Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy.  We talked about virtualization, storage, cloud and of course Scale-Out NAS.     

VMblog.com:  Virtualization technology has become a common element in any enterprise data center.  Do you think the storage industry has been keeping up with the demands of virtualization?

Periasamy:  The storage industry has clearly lagged virtualization advances in the server market and is often the Achilles heel on the path to full data center virtualization. Storage vendors need to close the 'server-storage virtualization gap' and transform storage infrastructure to reflect where compute is today. Storage should be a commoditized, virtualized, and a centrally managed pool of resources where data is not tied to physical hardware - just like virtual machines are today. As vendors begin to approach storage more as a software problem, the industry will accelerate the pace at which the gap is closed.

VMblog.com:  Recently there has been more focus on scale-out NAS solutions.  What are the benefits of NAS vs. SAN, and why scale-out?

Periasamy:  As virtual servers have evolved to larger scale mission critical deployments, they are putting a strain on storage infrastructure which is typically a SAN. Data center managers are looking for alternatives that provide improved scale and performance at a lower cost. Scale-out NAS offers better scalability, is more effectively shared and cost effective. With the use of a global namespace large amounts of aggregate I/O and capacity can be brought to bear eliminating I/O bottlenecks and increasing performance.

VMblog.com:  How does scale-out NAS support highly dynamic environments like cloud computing?  Why is scalability so important in the cloud?

Periasamy:  Scalability is critical in the cloud because the environment is much more dynamic and unpredictable than in the past. Scale-out NAS is an ideal fit for this kind of environment because rather than trying to predict storage needs out into the future, resources can be added on demand and storage can be provisioned quickly and efficiently.

VMblog.com:  What are some of the concerns you hear from end users about cloud storage, and what should enterprises be thinking about?

Periasamy:  We hear lots of evidence that cloud storage has moved past the investigation stage and into actual production. From both the early adopters and those just starting out, customers are most concerned about finding the right technology to match their business problems. As the industry is breaking new ground, many organizations are finding that traditional monolithic scale-up architectures are not best suited to meet today's needs. Customers are concerned about finding technology that helps them move to a fully-virtualized data center where resources can be pooled and shared dynamically.

VMblog.com:  Within the next year, what do you see as the number one challenge for the storage industry?

Periasamy:  I think the focus will be on continuing to improve the virtualization capabilities of storage as this addresses the two key issues of virtualizing the entire data center and moving more workloads to the cloud. This is the only way that the industry can achieve the promise of a true utility model for compute and storage.

Thanks again to Anand Babu Periasamy for taking time out to speak with me and answer a few questions.  You can find out more about Gluster on the company's Web site.