Zilla recently tweeted this
'Well since HP bought StorageWorks and OEM the XP and IBM OEM a lot of stuff. I want to know which one trick pony is innovative?'
Last week at EMC Customer Council I was already thinking, what really innovative stuff have I seen from anyone in the past year( and was mentally composing a blog entry)? And to be brutally frank, absolutely nothing! I've seen stuff which I think is neat, examples include
- Compellent's automated storage tiering – but that just builds on age-old ILM concepts. It's not innovative!
- LSI's DPM Storage Virtualisation Device has some neat Snap technology allowing Snaps to be taken across array boundary's and mounted a la FlexClones. It's just building on fairly well understood Snap technologies. It's not innovative!
- 3PAR's latest iteration of it's thin provisioning allowing thick-to-thin. Logical progression of Thin Provisioning. It's not innovative!
- Dudupe – lets be honest, just compression techniques taken a stage further. Single instancing for instance has been around for ages. It's not innovative!
- FCoE – not innovative!
There's not a lot of innovation around at the moment. Pretty neat but not clever.
In the wider IT market? I see a lot of recreation of old mainframe technologies making their way into the virtualisation technologies that are now so much in vogue.
Even in the home market, I'm not seeing innovation at the moment. Progression, yep; evolution, yep but innovation? No, not really. Let's face it, most of the desktop paradigms even today are simply evolution from the work that Xerox did all those years ago.
So does it matter? Are we just going to see the refinement of existing technologies for the time being? Or is something truly innovative going to come along? I certainly hope so! It's going to get awfully boring if we don't.
P.S Obviously was thinking along the same lines as Chris Evans; although I'm looking at the industry in general and not just EMC. In fact I seem to be stealing a lot of Chris' topics at the moment!! Perhaps we're the same person, I hope not!!
I gotta disagree on at least one item: Compellent’s architecture is definitely innovative. And what Ocarina is doing is something else entirely, so that’s innovative too.
I guess you two are going to force me to write up a post on innovation, eh?
Stephen
I think the Compellent architecture is great but it doesn’t strike me as innovative; more a logical progression. I hope they don’t get steam-rollered by a combination of the current economic climate and what is bound to be a tidal wave of Automagic Storage Tiering products driven by the desire to best utilise SSDs.
For the record, Martin and I are *not* the same person. No-one could be that unlucky. 🙂
Even if Martin and Chris were the same person, THAT would not be innovative.
How about chewing tobacco foam?
Or a benchmark that all vendors think is great?!
Or steering wheel cam built into the steering wheel?
Or a webinar system that keeps everybody awake?!
Now Marc, you are just being plain silly!! A benchmark which all vendors think is great?? Lay off the crystal!!