NetApp's Jay Kidd is going door to door talking up his company, while hanging out at the SearchStorage offices he said something which I found to be..odd.
Jay Kidd: In the file virtualization space, the NeoPaths, the Acopia's, Rainfinity -- none of them did all that well. If you put all those companies together, I doubt there's a dollar of profit in that entire set of businesses.
I can only assume that he's talking about pre-acquisition Rainfinity as post acquisition EMC Rainfinity is one of EMC's fastest growing new product lines, growing by a triple digit percentage in the last quarter alone.
What we're talking about with EMC Rainfinity is File Level Virtualization and NetApp despise file level virtualization as it demolishes some of their value prop and can slow down sales of additional NAS devices into their customer accounts. Indeed it can slow down Celerra sales as well, but the idea behind having a broad spectrum of products is that you can solve a problem with the right technology instead of solving it with the only piece of technology you have on hand.
So what is EMC Rainfinity and what does it do?
It's an appliance (Or appliance cluster) you pop onto your network. You connect it to your switch configure it, point it at the NAS devices you plan on managing and you're good to go. You don't install any host based agents/change mount points or anything like that which means you can just unplug from the switch whenever you feel like it.
While you are using it though you'll have access to some nifty functionality, lets look at some of it quickly.
-Capacity Management: Watch it locate the capacity hot and cool spots on your NAS devices and then perform transparent balancing operations between NAS devices in the background.
-File Management: You create an archiving policy, perhaps Centera is your archive target which it very well could be since EMC has shipped 150PBs of Centera CAS to date, and it'll identify and then move files to which the policy applies into your archive.
-Global Namespace: Scrape together any number of NAS file systems and present them as a single virtual filesystem and/or manage any number of distributed CIFS & NFS namespaces from a single place.
-Migration & Consolidation: Move files around the place transparently and without affecting applications or users.
-Performance Management: Pinpoint performance bottlenecks and access hotspots then watch it take action to eliminate or alleviate them without disruption.
-Synchronous IP Replication: Select what you want replicated and where you want it replicated to. It'll make it happen.
-Tiered Storage Management: What are those infrequently accessed files doing sitting on high performance disk? Rainfinity can move those to higher capacity lower performance disk and it'll do so automatically by looking at the file's frequency of access.
Personally I think it's a pretty nifty product which adds a bucket load of extra IQ points to NAS devices, so I suppose my conclusion is as follows:
If you're a NetApp shop and want to raise Jay's blood pressure tell your NetApp sales person that you're looking at File Level Virtualization, but regardless of what NAS you may have in your data center if you want to lower your own blood pressure you should take a serious look at EMC Rainfinity.
