Jon Toigo  |
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Jon William Toigo is directeur en eigenaar van Toigo Partners
en voorzitter van The Data management Institute LLC. |
03 september 2010 - Devil’s advocate
My summer ‘staycation’ has seen vendor after vendor calling to schedule briefings on their latest round of product announcements. To a one, their pitch is a cliché recitation of things that we already know: “Today’s economic reality requires IT staff to do more with less—less resources, human and machine.” Their conclusion flows from the first proposition by rote: “So, it stands to reason that storage needs to become smarter.”
The pitchperson next attempts to intrigue me with a narrative describing how some new function they have added to their array controller helps to alleviate the management workload borne by the already overburdened storage or server administrator. They are, in effect, delivering ‘smarter storage’ that enables even simpletons to manage enterprise infrastructure.
Just to be mean, I endure the briefing, then play the devil’s advocate. By stove-piping software functionality on the array controller, I ask, aren’t you actually locking in the customer and locking out your competitors? With your proprietary software, aren’t you making it more difficult for the consumer to manage heterogeneous infrastructure via a common, unified approach? For all of the labor saving you describe, aren’t you actually increasing cost of ownership, given that a) software licenses cost real money for years after hardware has been acquired and b) software breaks far more often than hardware, resulting in greater downtime potential in ‘smart’ storage versus ‘stupid’ bare-bone rigs?
When the marketing flak is sufficiently deflated, sadist that I am, I offer that I am just trying to ask the questions a smart consumer might ask about his smart storage. “Marketeers need to be prepared with answers to these questions… but almost never are.”
Some spokespersons counter with the offer of a whitepaper that further explains their innovative technology, noting that it is replete with validating commentary from a prominent industry analyst (one whom they usually paid for positive remarks). I then remind them of what a client once told me: “We are delighted when a vendor sales representative produces a whitepaper. It usually means that our meeting is over.”
The truth is: smarter storage arrays aren’t what anyone needs. We need a smarter storage model. Instead of hosting value-added functionality on an array controller, we ought to be dumbing down storage rigs and keep only those functions on their controllers that actually need to be there for reasons of proximity to the disks themselves. All value-added features should be hosted somewhere else—on external servers, in a virtualization layer, on a router or gateway—where they can be provided as services that are extendible across an ever-increasing compliment of spinning rust.
Until recently, this was the mainframe way. The mainframe hosted value-added services as software, while direct-attached storage devices (DASD) were basically just crates of disk drives. The model drove cost out of hardware, enabling us to capture the falling cost of commodity components, and set the stage for the establishment of a real service-oriented approach for delivering services to data, based on what the data actually needed.
In the distributed world, I hadn’t seen a workable equivalent to this architecture until very recently. Xiotech Corporation, based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, has changed my view. Their concept of smart storage is to offload most value-added functionality from their ‘storage blades’, while enabling each blade with a W3C Web Services software stack that uses REST protocols to collect and present its status and capabilities. I visited their headquarters this summer and they knocked my socks off with a presentation of their latest CorteX sample innovation, called ISE View, where ISE stands for ‘intelligent storage element’. You can see the video I shot of their demonstration at my C-4 Project website. They connected about a petabyte of storage and managed it, using first an Apple iPad, then an iPhone.
In the future, any product—software or hardware—from any vendor that eschews proprietary APIs for REST-based Web Services will be able to participate in this common Web Services-based management paradigm, which is being spearheaded by Xiotech. In fact, Xiotech is openly sharing the code it developed to instrument its own ISE storage arrays. Presumably, the company’s ecosystem partners will pick up on this so third party value-added software can be integrated with their hardware.
Bottom line: while some vendors assert that their value-added innovations make their hardware smarter, I think that the standards-based management approach that Xiotech is pursuing makes their products not smarter, but wiser.