Many of you have heard of Virtual Volumes (VVols) storage technology, which allows essential increasing of storage I/O performance within VMware vSphere environment by using logical volumes for certain virtual machines components and transferring of some storage operations to disk arrays.

As I review the marketing pitches of many software-defined storage products today, I am concerned by the lack of attention in any of the software stack descriptions to any capabilities whatsoever for managing the underlying hardware infrastructure. This strikes me as a huge oversight.

The truth is that delivering storage services via software — orchestrating and administering the delivery of capacity, data encryption, data protection and other services to the data that are hosted on a software-defined storage volume – is only half of the challenge of storage administration. The other part is maintaining the health and integrity of the gear and the interconnect cabling that provide the all-important physical underlayment of an increasingly virtualized world.