The Anarchist posts an account written by one of EMC's engineers imagining the day in the life of a future application administrator, managing storage has now got so simple that we no longer need specialist storage administrators. It's a compelling vision but how likely is it to come to pass?
That's a hard question to answer, EMC certainly believe that they are going to announce technology that will enable this and all indications are that they are going to be setting out more details at EMC World. It'll certainly be interesting to see how ready the technology is and how near to ship it is, let's hope that they can do better than they have with FAST2.
But as I keep saying this is not about technology, it's about people and process.
Firstly, EMC is not the storage world; there are plenty of companies out there who are not running EMC storage or at least are running EMC storage and something else. If this is an EMC only tool with a huge cost to migrate into; there will be resistance and it's not only a case of migrating into; there is the cost of getting out of again. Technology refreshes are not just upgrades to the latest from the incumbent vendor.
I suspect that somewhere along the line, there will be some interesting changes in maintenance costs; you will be incentivised to upgrade to the latest greatest; I mean it is easy, why wouldn't you and if the maintenance costs for year's 4+ are high; well, the TCO 'savings' would stack up on paper.
Anyway, let's just say that you look at the figures and you decide that actually this all stacks up for you over the next 5-10 years. So off you set on this journey.
Firstly, you've got define a service catalogue; now this isn't quite as easy as you might think; yes, I can define a service but what does that actually mean in Business terms? What does 5000 IOs per sec, 5 ms response time, 500 Megabytes per second really mean to a Business User? Do you review all your current applications and define service tiers around those? RTO and RPO; we talk to the Business about those already and still we struggle to get meaningful answers.
Nothing spoken about in Anarchist's blog entry really addresses these problems.
Secondly, how does this new dynamic world fit into the current processes? Now, we can sit and moan about whether the current processes are fit for purpose; whether the current change, configuration, problem and incident management processes really work. But many of these processes have been in place for years and actually do a pretty good job with today's technology.
But we aren't talking about today's technology? Sorry, this is not a black and white situation; you will not suddenly stop using today's technology and if there is one thing which will cause chaos, that is having two different processes in place (unless you try to run as two different IT organisations). This is a non-trivial problem.
I also love the comments about chargeback. Chargeback in nearly every organisation I've for/with has been one of those things which seems like a good idea until the Finance Department get involved. We get into complex areas about Capital versus Operational Expenditure; what does the chargeback cover etc, etc.
EMC's vision is marvellous and compelling, the technology is the least of the problems but I will add something on that. I seem to recall that we were supposed to have no application developers by now; that code-generation was going to get so simple that a business user would be able to define their applications based on business rules and the business application would be generated. I suspect that there are more application developers now than there have ever been.
