The debate surrounding why or why not you should be virtualizing your storage network has just been heated up yet again. EMC's release of its new and improved Invista solution has industry chatter increasing to almost deafening proportions. The company line on the product says Invista is a "high-performance networked storage virtualization solution that runs on intelligent SAN switches-placing virtualization intelligence in your existing SAN infrastructure." EMC says the main area of separation between Invista and its competitors is this: Invista "takes advantage of new specialized processing power in the switch to perform I/O redirection and other virtualization tasks at wire speed."

It means that once again, you're faced with a choice of storage virtualization, which at least one expert has indicated may not be a workable solution, or bypassing the choice until the industry catches up with itself and can provide a more robust and relevant solution for the IT public.

The good news is the industry is evolving, partly in thanks to efforts of companies such as EMC and IBM. But the gloves are off - I got a note from Charles Zinkowski, global media relations manager for IBM, who had this to say:

"While EMC has been evolving - and evolving - and evolving - their storage virtualization story, IBM has designed, delivered, and continued to enhance our highly reliable, scalable, and robust storage virtualization solution for years, with thousands of customer installs across the globe. There are companies that simply talk about storage virtualization like EMC, and then there are companies like IBM that do storage virtualization."

"Overall, IBM has been delivering virtualization capabilities for more than 40 years, and with storage virtualization and IBM's SAN Volume Controller, we have seen significant, publically announced milestones achieved over the
years - with thousands of SVC engines running in thousands of SVC systems worldwide. Customers are continuing to look at IBM as a leader in storage virtualization solutions that help them lower energy costs, optimize their
infrastructure and unlock proprietary technology - and competitors are looking at IBM as the prime example for how to do storage virtualization correctly."

Ouch. So what does EMC have to say about that? We'll bring EMC's response tomorrow...