There have been a couple of articles recently on the HDS blogs about HDP; Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning is HDS’ thin provisioning offering and like all of the thin-provisioning, it also offers wide-striping. I am not going to get into whether HDS’ offering is chubby, skinny or just slightly overweight but what I am going to ask is if wide-striping is so foundational and so important to the storage industry and especially to improving my TCO as a end–user, why do I have to pay extra for it?

Outages happen; big horrible nasty outages happen. In a career which now spans over twenty years, I’ve been involved with probably half a dozen; from PDUs catching fire due to overload to failed air-conditioning to wrong application of the EPO*. I have been involved in numerous tests; failing over services and whole data-centres on a regular basis and for most of these tests, the end-user would not have been aware anything was happening.

Myself and Tony Asaro have had a bit of snit over the uniqueness of the USP-V; he opines that it is unique and I am right that it is not unique. In many ways, this comes down to Tony’s opinion that the USP-V is unique because it is the only external storage virtualisation array which is Enterprise Storage. In his opinion neither the v-Series or the SVC are Enterprise Storage and hence do not compete with the USP, DMX and DS8K range. Also in SVC’s case because it does not have it’s own disk and simply virtualises external arrays; it is not a storage device (I’ll leave that comment alone).

Steve Duplessie is both right and wrong in his post on SSDs. He is right that simply sticking SSDs into an array and treating them as just Super Speedy Disk can cause yet more work and heartache! Concepts such as Tier 0 are just a nightmare to manage!

I have a lot of sympathy for Chad’s and Chuck’s recent posts here and here on Oracle support for VMware but I would have a lot more sympathy for them if EMC did not have such a track-record for using the support matrix as a marketing weapon.

We often talk about trying to make capital acquistions cost neutral in less than eighteen months; a reduction in Opex to offset the capital cost. Vendors are often complicit in this, as I mentioned in my previous entry, inflated maintenance costs mean that is often cheaper to refresh and take the bundled maintenance offered with a new system than to continue to pay maintenance on the legacy kit.

Many companies are working on a three-five year refresh cycle, but should this be increased to seven? What needs to happen to make this so?

Whilst HDS and EMC throw rocks at each other with regards to whether it is better to build custom parts or take things off the shelf and just use custom when you require. I think we should look beyond the hardware and look at what is coming down the line to us.

I seem to be doing a lot of thinking about clouds, dynamic data centres and what it all means. I do believe that the architectures of the future will become increasingly dynamic and virtualised. I was playing with EC2 and AWS at the weekend and I can see a time that I won’t bother the ridiculous amount of hardware that I have at home for playing with virtual appliances and ‘stuff.’ And I can see that it makes increasing amount of sense for a lot of the things we do at work but….I have some questions/thoughts about storage in the public cloud and to a certain extent, the private cloud.

How did a online bookseller become potentially the most important IT Supplier in the world? Were their employees not simply selling books but also devouring them to solve their own internal problems? And without Amazon beginning to scare the beejesus out of the traditional IT suppliers, would we have cloud?