They are lifeless ideas nearly devoid of meaning – but they just won’t die. Like real – if a mythical creature can be called “real” – zombies they take a long time to kill.
In a time of economic crisis, when IT organizations are begging for resources from gimlet-eyed CFOs and IT marketers are trying to win attention to new products, the industry needs new ideas. And that means getting rid of some old ones.
And the nominees are:
- Grid. StorageMojo declared “Grid is dead” 18 months ago, but some people didn’t get the memo. Call it a cluster and make life easier for your prospects to understand what you’re trying to sell them.
- CAS. Content Addressable Storage has the germ of a good idea – extended metadata – but as a feature it has been overtaken by the more recent need for e-discovery and compliance features. EMC didn’t help by attaching the name to a costly, proprietary and hackable platform.
- Object. Objects come in 2 varieties: files with extended metadata wrapped around them; and data slices of consistent size -like the Google FS chunks. Extended metadata isn’t a useful differentiator – see CAS above – so calling a file with a metadata wrapper an object may be correct but it it doesn’t help prospects understand what you’re doing. It’s a file with extended metadata.
- RAID. The term RAID started losing its mojo years ago and the trend has accelerated with the adoption of “file-based RAID” and other data protection strategies. Yes, customers have been well-trained to associate RAID with data protection goodness and that’s worth something. But if you have redundant data protection that isn’t RAID you’re missing a chance to say to say “better than RAID.” RAID 5/6 controller costs and reconstruction hassles are worth some snark if you don’t have them.
- Cloud. Yep, the word du jour is, because of its popularity, rapidly being drained of meaning. Public? Private? Compute? Storage? Cheap? Secure? Software? Infrastructure? What??? Sure, talk about cloud, but for goodness sake don’t put the word cloud in a product name. You’ll regret it within 2 years if you do. If you simply must then follow EMC’s oblique approach with Atmos.
The StorageMojo take
Marketers are exhorted to create a niche and dominate it, which leads to much unneeded niche creation. Most die unmourned, except by the people who wasted time and money trying to instill life and meaning into them.
Once we have terms like RAID that are accepted we are wise to use them for as long as they make sense. But for many vendors RAID is no longer what they do. The term obscures the real advantages of their architecture.
Extended metadata is an idea for which we have no good label today. Yet it is now needed in many markets because we are realizing that electronically stored information needs more metadata the longer we keep it.
A clever, catchy name for extended metadata would help the industry educate customers on the need and the benefit. Any ideas?
Courteous comments welcome, of course. No, I don’t have any ideas for what to name extended metadata. I’m not very good at naming.
tags
extended attributes! not my term, of course.
I’m not convinced that the extended metadata is a storage device function. Yes we need it but for things like E-discovery we need full text indexing too.
I could be just as happy with an archiving software/data mover that stored the extended metadata and index in a database as a XAM like extended file system with metadata that the archiving/data mover software had to populate.
Where does data end and metadata begin? Suppose I receive a French document, and, as an English speaker, wish to add an English translation. Would be metadata? If you say no, then I need to store it elsewhere and keep track of the association between the two texts using some other mechanism, which will play the say role as metadata. Bad idea.
Now, to me, the French was the received data, the English the metadata. Maybe to someone else it’s the other way around. Maybe I work in Canada and the document is something that has both French and English versions that, by law, are considered to have equal validity. Does it then make sense to add that “meta” prefix to one but not the other?
Forget metadata. What you want is rich data. Data with annotations, translations, environment information, history – all kinds of things. Books have footnotes and endnotes and appendices. Metadata, or just part of the book?
I’ll give you you’re argument for rich data and a file format that housed multiple translations for an app that would let you switch, or even see side by side, would be cool but it’s not metadata.
Metadata is data ABOUT the data and a translation is a version OF the data. Now a metadata format that provided reference to the translation, which could be XML in XAM or stored in a content management system database would be cool.
Note that even by your book analogy the translation will be a different volume in the library.
@Object.
Object can’t go. Used and generally abused, but it’s still the right term and by no mean outmoded. Object as used in storage is data with some metadata. Now, if you have a store that has multiple types of data; say Files and Emails, what do you call the content? You could call everything a “File” but I think that is misleading. Object is the right term.
@Jerry Leichter and metadata.
No, translating a document into a different language creates a new document. It cannot be metadata. That’s just WRONG.
“then I need to store it elsewhere and keep track of the association between the two texts using some other mechanism, which will play the say role as metadata. ”
That’s what metadata is for. It can be structured to form bonds and relationships. In this instance I would have metadata that just said that this is a “derivative” of another document. There would be a tag also saying which language it’s in. That’s it, simple.
Remember that the translated work may end up having revisions in its own right. If you were to store the translated works in the metadata then you will be constantly updating metadata. That’s very very broken. Would you then have to have different revision of the metadata? How do you cope with that? That’s even more perverted than people that put all the content in XML in attributes instead of creating new sub elements.
@Cloud
As much as I believe in the use of cloud storage and often an advocate, the term makes my ears bleed. But then, the question is, what would you call it? (I do agree calling a product by the fashion of the day is silly).
@Extended metadata=EMOMB
How about EMOMB. Like any good modern acronym I will need to describe how to pronounce it. More importantly it stands for “Extended Metadata Overused Marketing Buzzword”.
I don’t think we can find a good name for this yet as its not been defined. Maybe this is where XAM will save us. Until then I would resist any new term as it will end up being marketing gibberish with every vendor citing how they have “EMOMB driven architecture”, “EMOMB platform” and “EMOMB value added solutionsâ€. We wouldn’t have moved a step forward and would be begging for the return of “Cloudsâ€.
Fab
Robin, I don’t think the problem is so much with the terms themselves (particularly “object” and “RAID”). It’s the way folks use them as though they were magical incantations.
Various buzz-o-meter indices are generally based, in fact, on how long a given term maintains its aura of magic, not on the inherent worth of the concept(s) represented by the term.
Cheers,
Alan