More Things Change….

Seeing the latest spat involving EMC regarding Xtreme-IO is kind of nice; it feels like the arguments of days gone by; swap NAS and Flash, you’ll probably find the same blog entries work and the same arguments made.

Storage seems to be more cult-like in nature which leads to these vigorous debates and some rather amusing tantrums. It is probably closer to the ‘Linux distribution’ model as opposed to the ‘Operating System model’ .

In the server world, it is a pretty large investment in time and money to move from one operating system to another; it is certainly pretty disruptive. Yet in the storage world, we can change vendors with some ease; we understand migrating workloads in a non-disruptive manner. It would be fairly unusual to find a Storage Manager who can’t describe at least in theory how to do this. This leads too many vendors feeling a little nervous and tense; customers do have a lot more power and choice in this space.

It also means that there is space in the market for newcomers to come in and disrupt; it is probably ironic that EMC own the company and technology that actually allows their core storage products to be most disrupted. VMware allowed NetApp to get a massive foothold in some of EMC’s backyard and it seems that it may also allow some of the flash vendors to get a foothold too.

It used to be fairly common to find a fairly homogeneous storage environment with EMC owning a whole data-centre; in talking to my peers in the industry, this is less common. Multiple storage vendors are becoming the norm despite the management headaches that this does bring at times. Many of the headaches are overstated mind you and as more people come to realise this, this will put yet further pressure on the likes of EMC.

I wonder if this is why EMC get particularly sensitive about the whole subject? They can’t out innovate the myriad of small storage start-ups and indeed they enable many of them; this will mean that they will be slower to market and will rely on their engineering being very solid and spot-on.

All sounds strangely familiar mind you!