Although I give the various players a hard time; the industry doesn’t do everything badly and I try to see the positives as well as the negatives. So I was thinking about the perfect array and what features I would like to see! So a random stream of consciousness produced the following!

• Reliability – DMX-like reliability and robustness
• Scalability – DMX-like scalability for block, IBM SOFS for NAS
• Performance – DMX-like performance for block, BlueArc for NAS
• Flexibility – Support for all protocols in a common consistent manner like OnTap
• Thin Provisioning – 3Par’s thin provisioning
• Wide Striping – Genuine wide-stripping across ALL Spindles not just a proportion or across groups of spindles – Think 3Par
• Automated Storage Tiering – Think Compellant on steroids!
• Automated Optimisation – Think 3Par
• Dedupe – Dedupe at block or file level – not seen a truly great dedupe solution yet
• Scalable Heterogeneous Support – IBM SVC or HDS
• Minimal-performance impacting Snapshots – think NetApp or….Sun
• Writeable Thin Clones – think LSI’s DPM8400
• Synchronous Replication – think SRDF
• Asynchronous Replication – think of something which works without a huge amount of work
• Provisioning interface – think XIV, think 3Par
• Analytics – think Sun
• Monitoring/reporting – think Onaro
• Cost – think PC World (who are too expensive to but you get the idea!)

So a merger between IBM/EMC/HDS/NetApp/Sun/Compellant/BlueArc/LSI/3Par would be a great start. Let’s throw Cisco into the mix as well for a unified data-centre fabric and we’re done!

What features do you want to see? I’d love to know!

And vendors, without too much marchitecture, what are your killer features? The things that you are most proud of? I don’t want a big bragging list but what’s the one problem you think you’ve solved which you are most proud of?