So as I prepare to go back to work after the Christmas Break; thoughts turn yet again to the wonderful world of storage. Recession starts to recede but it will still be felt through-out the industry and this will continue to drive developments; has a new frugality settled over the world of storage?
Certainly the last year has seen a drive to more efficient storage; de-duplication, compression, thin-provisioning and other technologies are becoming de rigeur in feature sets. However, there are still plenty of nay-sayers in user-land who for what-ever reason are still not deploying and using the technologies available. More work needs to be done to convince people that these features are good things.
But the industry can feel some satisfaction that it has at least put the features to make storage efficient at the heart of their products. Now, I think that the next big push has to be making storage effective; better automation, both tiering but also provisioning; better instrumentation allowing greater visibility of what is going on in our storage environments, better integration with virtual environments and application awareness.
Also a huge amount of work needs to be done on working out how we make storage effective in environments which are far outstripping the performance and capacities that we have worked with in the past. Closely working with colleagues in other infrastructure disciplines so that we share some of the arcane storage management disciplines; for example understanding IOPS, throughput and capacity; automated tiering will help with some of these but if you've got the wrong balance of disk on the floor in the first place, the problem is not going to be fixed effectively.
As part of the moves to a new effectiveness, I am certain we are going to see some sacred cows slain. I'm expecting 'Hell to Freeze Over' a couple of times as vendors move away from legacy positions in the past; I think we have already seen some of this, you just have to know where to look.
Happy New Year….may it be another interesting one…
Interesting comments around sacred cows being slain… there are a number that spring to mind and some very big changes in direction from a couple of the biggies… will be good fun to see how these changes in direction are presented to end customers without getting a certain amount of egg on face!
Martin
Happy New Year to you and everyone in the storage industry.
Sorry for not reading your blog recently. Nothing personal, just a bit busy with the new job. I 100% agree with your comments. I am still frustrated by customers and some people who work for vendors who shy away or are totally negative to features such as thin provisioning.
As you say many vendors have now delivered the hardware and functionality that is required to enable storage to be more efficient but it requires the customers to have a desire to implement the new hardware and functionality, and requires the vendors to encourage this and deliver software that aids in this.
And it is always good to see the marketing people at various vendors claiming a feature or hardware design is bad or unnecessary, only for said vendor to then deliver it 6 or 12 months later. I learnt from an early age, don’t be negative about a competitive feature.
Keep the posts going. They are always interesting. And I will hopefully find some time to do a few posts myself.