One of the impacts of the global slowdown has been that many companies have been focussing on services and infrastructure which is just good enough. For some time now, many of the mainstream arrays have been considered to be good enough. But the impact of SSD and Flash may change our thinking and in fact I hope it does.
So perhaps Good Enough Isn’t Really Good Enough? Good Enough is only really Good Enough if you are prepared to stagnate and not change; if we look at many enterprise infrastructures, they haven’t really changed that much in over the past 20 years and the thinking behind them has not changed dramatically. Even virtualisation has not really changed our thinking because still despite the many pundits and bloggers like me who witter on about service thinking and Business alignment; for many it is just hot-air.
There appears to be a lack of imagination that permeates our whole business; if a vendor turns up and says ‘I have a solution which can reduce your back-up windows by 50%’, the IT manager could think ‘Well, I don’t have a problem with my back-up windows; they all run perfectly well and everyone is happy…’. What they don’t tend to ask is ‘If my back-up windows are reduced by 50%, what can I do with the time that I have saved; what new service can be offered to the Business?’
Over the past few years, the focus has been on Good Enough; we need to get out of this rut and start to believe that we can do things better.
As storage people, we have been beaten up by everyone with regards to cost and yet I still hear it time and time again that storage is the bottle-neck in all infrastructures; time to provision, performance, and capacity; yet we are still happy to sit comfortably talking about ‘Good Enough Storage’.
Well, let me tell you that it isn’t ‘Good Enough’ and we need to be a lot more vocal in articulating why it isn’t and why doing things differently would be better; working a lot closer with our customers in explaining the impact of ‘Good Enough’ and letting them decide what is ‘Good Enough’.
i guess it depends on what your context of “good enough” really means… It should never be the vendor talking about good-enough, but the end-user / consumer…. The amount of times i have gone into looking at technology – and a bunch of techies are chasing after perfection for no good reason is a problem. Also – vendors touting the technical superiority at each other doesnt float my boat… I guess this gig is all about understanding realistic requirements, judge against them and ensure that technology is delivered to that agenda…