Simplicity and minimalism are in vogue these days. Gone are the days of complicated and convoluted products. As an example, look at Apple Inc, which has a set a trend in this day and age by taking product design motivation from Braun, a German electronic company from an earlier era, and infusing the latest technological capabilities and simplifying how one interacts with technology.
Other examples include minimalistic shoes from Nike, New Balance,Inov-8 and furniture from Ligne Roset and Herman Miller's, which emphasize clean lines and simplistic designs.
All these are examples have proved that the simplistic nature and effortless design of products is the key to thrive in today's market.
We can draw the same lines of conclusion with technologies like SAN today.
Not too long ago, all we had was DAS (direct attached storage). Compute was directly attached to its storage via ATA,SATA,eSATA,SCSI,SAS and in some cases Fibre channel, and the compute admin/system admin was also responsible to manage the storage.
Life was simple.
DAS was an effective solution as long as the amount of data was easily contained in the amount of space provided in the system and there was an effective replication strategy. For example software mirroring with software like Sun Microsystem Disk Solstice or Veritias Volume Manager or even a hardware RAID strategy for performance or a back up to tape solution in place. The main disadvantages of this approach were its inability to share data or unused resources with other servers. Although this was indirectly addressed with the wide acceptance of protocols like NFS,SAMBA and CIFS, it still provided an opportunity for storage vendor's to concoct solutions like SAN.
The coming of SAN brought along with it much more hardware and wide range of complexities in implementation and a new learning curve. The role of a compute admin / system
admin was now broken up into 2 separate roles i.e one who now manages the SAN, comprising of storage arrays and storage switches, and the other who manages the compute. The compute admin now unlike before had to be in constant communication with the storage admin to effectively manage storage in compute environment, this increases communication and chances of mis-communication and many more touch points and layers of equipment to configure to get a simple end result i.e compute being able to read/write to disk.
The requirement to achieve a simple read/write to disk and being able to maintain a "golden copy" to revert back to in case of disaster became the most complicated and expensive solution ever designed, the innards of which are as cryptic and secretive as a working of an intelligence agency.
The storage admin himself does not have access to the inner workings of the SAN,and only interacts with a set of commands made available for carving out disk space and allocating it to compute.
Cisco with Unified Compute Systems was one of the first companies to realise that the compute/network/storage solutions available today was getting more and more complicated
and hence came out with a converged protocol FCOE and a simplistic approach to implement,provision and manage all these disparate technologies within a sinlge pane of glass management entity known as UCSM. This could go only so far to achieve real simplicity as in essence there were still multiple hardware devices and the SAN that still needed to be managed separately.
Solutions like vBlock were cobbled together to provide a sense of seamless integration, between hardware and virtulization software, but in reality, the complexity of the whole environment was being masked.
The end user would end up paying exorbitant amount to purchase the hardware and then have to also pay companies like Cisco,Vmware and eMC in consultancy and services fees to have these solutions designed and implemented by their Solutions Architects.
At the end of the day even though this was a step towards simplification and convergence, it still has long way to go to provide simplicity and true convergence of storage and compute.
Today, we have come a full circle and have learned from our follies and ineffciences and realised that the compute and storage are best when converged together without addition of complex SAN solutions.
The rapid development of hardware and software solutions in tandem has allowed Nutanix to virtualize the datacenter without requiring a SAN. It provides a distributed,replicated and yet a simple solution with a minimalistic approach towards acheiving the end result of completing a storage IO i.e read/write, at 40-60% CAPEX reduction by eliminating expensive network storage while providing highly advanced shared-storage capabilities.
Nutanix does this while still delivering the enterprise-class performance, scalability and data management features that are inherently required in a enterprise environment.
It is a hardware and software solution that provides complete server and storage capabilities that you need to run virtual machines and store their data. This building block approach allows you to start with what you need now and add additional blocks as your needs grow to scale-out a single system.
In essence the disadvantages of DAS have been very effectively resolved by Nutanix and today DAS can be scaled out /shared and all compute resources can be used to their full utilization.
Life can now go back to being "Uncompromisingly Simple".