At SNW Europe, I had a chance to sit down with David Dale of SNIA; we talked about various things, how SNIA becomes more relevant, how it becomes a more globally focused organisation and the IT industry in general. And we had a chat about SNIA’s role in the development of standards and suddenly companies who were not interested in standards are suddenly becoming interested in standards.
It appears in the world of Software-Defined everything; vendors are beginning to realise that they need standards to make this all to work. Although it is possible to write plug-ins for every vendor’s bit of kit; there is a dawning realisation amongst the more realistic that this is a bit of a fool’s errand.
So after years of dissing things like SMI-S; a certain large vendor who is trying to make a large play in the software-defined storage world is coming to the table. A company who in the past have been especially standards non-friendly…
Of course, they are busy trying to work out how to make their software-defined-storage API the de-facto standard but it is one of the more amusing things to see SMI-S dotted all over presentations from EMC.
But I think that it is a good point and important for us customers; standards to control and manage our storage are very important, we need to do more to demand that our vendors start to play ball. Storage infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex due to the new silos that are springing up in our data-centre.
It may well to be too early to predict the death of the Enterprise-Do-Everything-Array but a vigorously supported management standard could hasten its demise; if I can manage my silos simply, automating provisioning, billing and all my admin tasks…I can start to purchase best of breed without seriously overloading my admin team.
This does somewhat beggar the question, why are EMC playing in this space? Perhaps because they have more silos than any one company at the moment and they need a way of selling them all to the same customer at the same time…
EMC, the standard’s standard bearer…oh well, stranger things have happened…
I was part of the SNIA team that launched SMI-S – originally called “BlueFin” back in October 2002. I met a lot of great industry people through that experience. A vendor (whom I will not name but you can guess) was on every call, inserted themselves in front of reporters and analysts at the announcement (at an SNW event) but did everything they could behind close doors to stall and thwart SMI-S as they tried to push their own proprietary tool set (that they later killed). Funny indeed how times have changed.
So it’s all YOUR fault…. 🙂
LOL – I was only a volunteer! I almost forgot how much you love SMI-S!