I've had a few discussions recently with people about Storage Teams, how they are organised and what perhaps they should look like in the future. There is a feeling amongst many people who sit outside the storage arena that storage is a deep black art; the successor to the deep black art that was mainframe system programming. And for many years, the storage teams and the vendors have colluded in this.
Ask a storage manager to do something for you and there will often be a pursing of lips, an intake of breath and a comment, 'well I could give you that but that's not really the way it works'; or a narrowing of the eyes and a shaking of the head, 'Hmmm….complicated, it'll cost you!'.
Indeed, the storage monkey is the plumber of the infrastructure world! Or at least this is what it feels like looking in but this attitude/position is beginning to be challenged more and more; virtualisation has meant that generalists are becoming more common and infrastructure ownership is becoming blurred.
Who is the storage team when a Lefthand software appliance is deployed? Who is the storage team when a Sun 7000 gets deployed? In fact, arguably any NAS product has more in common with servers than traditional block storage arrays.
Who owns the converged network? Much of the resistance to iSCSI came from within the storage teams aided and abetted by the traditional vendors. However we now have FCoE and we now have the first commercially available FCoE array; so we are going to have to sort out the politics and the state of denial that we've all been in because FCoE is fibre channel and we can't get away with claiming anything different.
There will be a converged network and that network will be Ethernet; we can have two teams attempt to manage it or we can have one. I suspect that many will try the two teams approach, just as when I was first involved in deploying an IP network that we kept a seperate team to manage the SNA network. But eventually, the teams will merge and become one.
But I for one look forward to this; I look forward to the time where the storage team isn't begging the server team for root-level access to do something because they should all be one team and they should be pulling together to provide Service; not servers, storage and network but Service.
And I think that is the biggest win that the Cloud could give us. Technically we have been ready for the Cloud for some time; yes, the management tools are a bit lacking but we are ready. Politically and emotionally we need to move out of our infrastructure silos and move on.
This will causes some huge problems for some vendors in the future; it is going to be very hard to be just a storage vendor, just a server vendor or just a network vendor. I think you can get away with that for another two-three years but long-term, I think you might struggle.
