I’ve been thinking a bit about benchmarking and benchmarketing; pretty everyone agrees that SPC is a very poor representation of real world storage performance but at the moment, it’s the only thing that most of the market supports with one key exception. So I thought I’d come up with my own, so let me introduce the SSAC.
With Automated Tiering solutions now rapidly becoming de rigeur, well in announcement form anyway; perhaps it’s time for us to consider again what is going to go wrong and how much trouble the whole thing is going to cause some people.
Some months ago I speculated on the future of IBM’s storage roadmap; a post which I believed caused some consternation in IBM as it foreshadowed some of their recent announcement. I expect that over time even more of that entry’s predictions will become fact. For what is basically a packaging exercise, the v7000 is actually an interesting announcement in that it shows that IBM do want a piece of the storage pie and they are going to use their own products to do so.
Leadership, management and agility are becoming important watchwords in the role of IT delivery and it is these three concepts which need to drive any IT organisation forward over the next decade or so. It is the third of these that is probably the most important.
So we can thin-provision, de-dupe and compress storage; we can automate the movement of the data between tiers; now one single array may not have all these features today but pretty much every vendor has them road-mapped in some form or another. Storage Efficiency has been the watch-word and long may it continue to be so.
As we move from a time of IT as a scarce and controlled resource to a time where IT is seen as an abundant and easily available resource; we need to consider what this means to us in Enterprise IT. Is abundance a good thing and a power for good or does it bring with it issues?
Chuck has just written a blog which was very similar to a blog that I was working and I agree with a lot of what he says but I’d take it a lot further and there are some interesting conclusions and potentials along the way which could open the market for interesting innovation going forward.
Having worked in Corporate Infrastructure for many years, fighting the good fight and trying to get the enemy to conform to best practise and generally think beyond the next line of code that they are writing, I surrender! I throw the towel in!
NetApp have announced the StorageGrid product, but is it a simple rebrand of the ByCast product? I am not sure whether I was expecting anything more or whether I was expecting them to go dark with the Bycast product set for the time being whilst they work out what the hell they are going to do with it and at least come up with an integration strategy for the products.
What can Apple teach us about Enterprise IT? Apple and Enterprise IT, words which don’t really belong in the same sentence but perhaps we can learn quite a lot about the future of Enterprise IT by looking at Apple and its current strategy.
