More pointless posturing by storage vendors in the continuing telenovela of the Storage Management Initiative Spec. Like the Latin American telenovela the dramatic storyline of the manly vendor and the alluring customer is punctuated with noisy fights, low comedy and passionate oaths of love and fealty.
Alas, it is all just theatre.
I’ve been involved in these dramas and know the drill. One character, the wealthy Status Quo, feels his relationship with the lovely but fickle Miss Shopper is threatened by a handsome and virile rake, Studly Tech. Status at first ignores Stud, hoping Miss Shopper will dismiss him out of hand. But Stud persists, and Miss Shopper, feeling Status is taking her for granted (as indeed he is) invites Studly to call upon her.
Shocked to the core of his very wallet,
Status thrashes about seeking to keep Miss Shopper’s attention. If snide asides don’t deflect her, tactics escalate. Status posts geeky henchmen in the dark alleys of the standards process to ambush the hero, while romancing Miss Shopper with soft words. solemn oaths to reform and promises of even greater love.
The tipping point comes,
if it ever does, when Miss Shopper decides to share her favors (purchase orders, in this case) with the virile young hero.
Sadly, the handsome hero is a mirage.
There is no real alternative to the current mishmash of costly and limited management products the major vendors provide. The balkanized storage infrastructure makes it impossible for startups to engineer reliable and cost-effective storage management suites. A state of affairs that suits the dastardly Status Quo just fine.
Preserving the status quo
is the goal of all this theatre. I see only two ways the current costly dynamic might change. First is through a disruptive technology, such as ZFS, applied to markets too small for the majors to care about dominating. Second is for major IT customers, particularly in the financial space, to start dedicating 2% of their IT budgets to explore alternatives to the current paradigm. CFOs need to see that unless IT vendors feel the hot breath of competition they will never give up their very profitable practices. Call it 2% for Competition and an investment in a much more resilient and affordable future.
As ever, comments welcome.
I proposed a Carbonite (“Online Storage I Could Use”) like Storage solution many times to different Managements in various areas of business over the course of my work life. I was always beaten down by “Legacy” issues and “Who do we sue if it doesn’t work?”.
Big Oil, in particular, is very sensitive to having a large legal entity to point fingers at. “Legacy” issues are the most insane of all. You covered this very well in your post “Reprint “Jonathan Livingston Seagull†Every 5 Years?”.
At one Big Oil company we converted all backup tapes to ASCII and put them on 80 column punch cards. Then we got some Management in that either didn’t understand that system or had some vendor whispering in their eye “We have a better way to do that!”, and that system was history.
If one of the mentored “golden boys” suggested something like the AFS file system they might put several $million into it. This was in spite of the fact that it violated their own “5 Year” test. The “5 Year” test is simply “Where do I buy support in 5 years?”.
It is curious. The greatest economic engine in the world is up for sale
by people charged with its safe-keeping. As our good people die in the
attempt to bring Democracy to other parts of the world we are losing it.
There is more than greed, hubris and incompetence at work here.
The Times they are A-Changin’! I feel it “Blowin’ in the Wind!”.
This is a great metaphor. Only I would like to add that Miss Shopper has a crack habit (exponentional data growth) and needs what the Status Quo has (more space). So the Status Quo is who she relies on until she’s put in detox. LOL We’d all take that 8 week program!!
Robert, it’s the 10,000 year clock problem- in volume. I like the punchcard idea. Easy to engineer a card reader no matter what.
Road Warrior meets HAL9000. It is sobering to think that so much of the world’s data could wiped out by a few EMP’s in the upper atmosphere. If nobody died, what would the rallying cry be “Remember the data center!”
Peeta, hilarious. Maybe some tanned wildman will show up driving a van with an open-source array in the back and win Miss Shopper’s heart. Cut to sunset on a beach – fade to black.
Don’t you think open source software might be the answer here. Aperi is the open source storage management project that IBM is participating in with 9 other storage vendors, and you just need to look at HP’s reaction to it to see that a threat to the status quo is there. It might take some time for widespread adoption, but most open source projects do. Think back a couple years when Sun and Microsoft were dismissing outright the Linux movement. Now they are embracing it because the end users are demanding it. Just give a good open source project time and it will grow.
Amarin,
In principle I support the Aperi effort. I just doen’t see it working. It is too easy to tweak interfaces to keep an open source product from working and too profitable a business to give up without a fight.
Keep me informed about how Aperi is doing and maybe I’ll change my mind. I hope it works.
Robin
Robin,
If IBM iplans to base its mangement platform on Aperi, then HW vendors would certainly have to interface with it or not allow themselves to be managed in this environment, right? Sso they have to do this work anyway. Aperi is focused on discovering, monitoring, and controlling storage hardware through standard APIs, most prominently SMI-S but also including SNMP and others. It also makes use of vendor-specific information in some cases, but Aperi doesn’t (and can’t) use proprietary/confidential or licensed APIs in an open source project.
I can see the larger storage vendors who are trying to focus more on managing the whole environment wouldn’t want their element managers to work with Aperi, but I don’t see a compelling reason for the other storage vendors to do this. As I said, they’re doing this anyway to be managed by IBM’s management software, so any other management tools based on Aperi is gratis. How long will customers put up with hardware that can only be managed by a proprietary management tool? I guess that’s the $64k question.