The Storage Industry is Late; no not dead but late. So instead of picking on just a single person, I'm going to call-out a whole load of vendors.
1) FAST2 on VMAX/DMX is late; the announcement was over a year ago and still there is no public GA announcement. No wonder Gelsinger is upping the amount of spending on R&D but I'd prefer him to spend money on Research, Development and Delivery.
2) OnTap 8.0 was late and despite all the current mutterings from the NetApp cabal; do we really expect the subsequent releases to be delivered in any more of a timely manner? OnTap 8.0 was feature light; a holding release and needs to get to 8.0.1 quickly and 8.1 soon after. I don't believe that NetApp have the resources to maintain multiple code trees, they need to get as much of their install base to 8.x as quickly as possible if they are to concentrate on innovating.
3) USP-NG or whatever it is to be called is late! I think a lot of us were expecting the replacement to be announced pretty much at the time of VMAX, yet we heard but the gentle chirping of crickets.
4) XIV enhancements are late; much of the NDA stuff I was told about two years ago has yet to be delivered. This was stuff which was supposedly easy to deliver and now it's just plain late. Instead we hear of a whole new bunch of features which will probably be late as well!
5) Soracle's delivery of a storage strategy is so late that it's looking like a Norwegian Blue.
6) EVA replacement? Is it late or just dead? Who knows?
I'm sure there are many other examples of tardiness in the industry!
If you feel left out and want to tell me which of your products that you are late with, I'd be happy to listen!
As always, fair and accurate post.
If you can share, what features of XIV are you referring to? Just curious.
Mike Dunn
Can’t really say as it’s still covered by NDA but size and speed of key components.
Martin,
You are more than right: the Storage Industry is not just Late, it’s Lame and Lazy as well! But instead of limiting the scope of your rant to “a whole load of vendors”, feel free to include the rest of the ecosystem, especially customers.
Trying to get a perspective, the overall picture is simply horrible! Storage is by far the most backward segment of an already conservative IT industry. One example: where databases all went relational in the late eighties of last century, file systems are still stubbornly hierarchical at the start of this second post-Y2K decennium. Make no mistake: the very same principles apply that caused the demise of hierarchical database dinosaurs like IMS, IDMS and Adabas. Utter inflexibility, inadmissible compromises caused by inseparable logical and physical modeling, painfully hard limits on scaling and geographical distribution, massive amounts of truly medieval manual labor involved in maintenance and migration, with astronomical levels of TCO and ecological footprint as a logical consequence.
You’d think that customers would welcome any opportunity to break away from this sorry state of affairs. Not really. Offers to explore ways to reduce storage TCO in large infrastructures by factors – not fractions! – generally meet with objections whose irrelevance reflects a solid desire not to rock the boat. With all due respect, look at the technical details you’re asking for in your post here. Do they *really* matter? Will they make a serious difference – factors, not fractions? If they do, are you willing to tell those vendors in a more forceful way than a blog post?
Just like voters get the politicians they deserve, storage customers get the products and the service that vendors know they’ll put up with. Until you vote with your feet. Maybe the time has come.
Have a safe trip,
Paul
Spot on….does like like a lot of future that are still out there.
The one bright spot I’ve seen recently though is VMware integration…seems to be going great funs across at least a couple storage vendors (EMC, NetApp, etc.). Vaughn Stewart’s post here for instance…
http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/2010/08/updated-vsphere-on-netapp-storage-best-practices-v21.html
…and hit Chad Sakac’s blog for more along those lines (I’m just to lazy to go grab a link).