Except Storage Vendors
It’s time to break the back of the storage oligopoly. Rip the still-beating heart out of this proprietary industry, drop it in a blender and hit “puree”. We have the weapons. History is on our side. Now is the time. Here is the plan.
The storage industry is badly broken. Vendors have gotten a free ride from the innovations of disk vendors to keep lowering array prices. Storage system interoperability is limited, storage networks are fragile, backups frequently don’t complete or are incomplete, margins are very high for what should be commodity products and storage management is hardly worthy of the name. Resellers and VARs, busy slathering on glue and bailing wire to hold things together, also get stuck with most of the evangelism, only to be relieved of their best customers when they are too successful.
Customers are paying a high cost as well. Not only in dollars, but in lost flexibility. CIOs are finding their jobs at risk as the Business Unit GMs look around and see smaller competitors rolling out high-value apps at a pace their own IT groups can only envy. Storage is the highest cost of most IT departments, who are paying $10, $15, even $20k a terabyte when disks are selling for $500 a terabyte. Vendors smother the big customers in support to keep them spending and to keep smaller, innovative vendors out.
With all this so profitable for vendors, whose hardware margins are the envy of the server world and whose thousands of point software products command high “value-based” prices, the industry has little incentive to change. And they don’t.
You Say You Want A Storage Revolution?
The good folks over at Storage Revolution have a plan: build open, agnostic storage management tools. A fine idea: many open-source projects are industry leading, like Linux and Apache. Yet, sadly, it won’t work here. Why? Let us count the ways:
Read The Rest of The Open Source Storage Revolution Everyone Should Join
I posted this over at DrunkenData. It is waiting approval. It may never see the light of day over there. Some sort of a threat to technical supremacy.{:-;
P.S. I went back and checked. It was already deleted… I submitted it again.
Responding to this statement—
“Now, if we could just move that technology out as a network service, we wouldn’t need anyone’s big iron anymore and we might just begin to capture the economics of disk rather than paying through the nose for controller based foo that we mostly don’t use.”
Do you have a brief view of your configuration vision for the network service? That you can share without giving the store away?
For example, think in terms of “The Speed Limit of the Information Universe”. Keep in mind we do not all own a Humvee or Porsche. What is a good figure of merit for “The Speed Limit of the Information Universe” in Personal Computing, SOHO, SMB’s (low to high-end), and the Enterprise, which sets the standard for all of the previously mentioned. Do we need a unique Information Storage system for each area? Or is there one massively scalable system waiting to be discovered? Does it scale vertically or horizontally? Or both?
The reason I ask is that your solution is no solution at all to the problem.
The problem, as stated by you, is “begin to capture the economics of disk rather than paying through the nose for controller based foo that we mostly don’t use”. Are you still managing at the spindle level?
People buying the HDS Tagma solution must work for the government. Or else they have the government’s features of unlimited money and no accountability. As an incremental extension of existing Storage the HDS Tagma is excellent. It doesn’t solve any problem except the HDS revenue and the IT Manager spending his budget in a “Politically Correct” way. Would a backbone of Tagma’s find enough bandwidth to solve any problems? Internally or externally?
Maybe we can emulate the Tagma with commodity priced hardware for a lot less cost. And make it scalable. Instead of “One Terabyte per hour and up” of Information bandwidth (network bandwidth is higher) “The Speed Limit of the Information Universe” can be scaled to fit the IT environment. One Terabyte per hour of Information bandwidth is a good starting point.
Think of a Strategy and Architecture using a BitTorrent approach
externally, instead of internally like Tagma does. Oh, the Tagma is fast but think of the “hotspot” management. Do you need to be concerned with what Information you put where or can the Information just be put anywhere? And then there is all that Content tagging we haven’t discussed at all?
Next time…
Everybody’s talking Revolution!
Interesting post at Jeff Tash’s ITscout Blog:
“The Revolution Will Not Be Podcast, Blogged or Wikied”
http://itscout.blogspot.com/2006/05/revolution-will-not-be-podcast-blogged.html
[Excerpt]
Columnist Joshua Greenbaum has been commenting on IT for as far back as I can remember. His most recent article helps to deflate some of the hype around Web 2.0.
“The Revolution Will Not Be Podcast,”
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/appmanagement/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=188101077
Josh doesn’t believe that so-called tech revolutions over the past 20 years — such as “the PC revolution, the Mac revolution, the Windows revolution, the Unix revolution, the business process re-engineering revolution, the client-server revolution, the ERP revolution, the open-source revolution, and, more recently and most tellingly, the dot-com revolution” — were indeed all that revolutionary. He writes:
Each one promised to sweep aside the old and wholly replace it with the new. Each proposed ways to disintermediate the sinners of the past from their manifold sins and show the world how the one true way could change everything we say and think and do. And each, by the time it had run its course, proved that “the more it changes, the more it remains the same” trumps “vive la revolution” in the slogan wars every time.