So we have VPLEX and despite some scratching of heads as to what it is; it is really quite simple, “storage access is further decoupled from storage physicality.” And this really is nothing especially new; decoupling the storage access from storage physicality has been going on for some time.

Hu Yoshida talks about an all too familiar case where storage decisions are made locally by the Business Units and the procurement strategy does not take account of the long-term health of the group; ongoing OpEx costs are not born by individual business units and become the problem of the IT department. The concept and value of shared infrastructure was not really understood by the Business.

HDS’ Hu makes a point in his latest blog entry in that Storage Virtualisation allows the end-user to turn commodity disk into enterprise disk by sticking it behind a virtualisation appliance; in Hu’s case, he’d deeply love that to be USP.