Jon Toigo
	Jon William Toigo is directeur en eigenaar van Toigo Partners en voorzitter van The Data management Institute LLC.

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13 april 2011 - Rites of spring

Each spring, new marketing campaigns from the storage vendors begin to surface through the wintry tundra, their early sprouts appearing in the reports of analysts and in the trend analyses published in the technology trade press. The marketeers seed and cultivate their messages so that they take root sufficiently to sur­vive at least until the summer heat begins. In other words: until product claims are subjected to the harsh sunlight of testing, implementation, and, ultimately, consumer adoption or rejection. The cycle began this year with a report from a leading analyst—no doubt paid for by a vendor client ‘sponsor’—asserting that the best way to drive cost out of storage infrastructure is to purchase all gear from one vendor.

Single-sourcing hardware has long been presented as a panacea for what ails storage in distributed environments. This reflects the ­failure of the industry to develop and implement common, open and rightful standards for hardware interoperability and management to replace the proprietary factual standards we had in the mainframe world.

For those of us old enough to remember, the entire business case for open-systems computing was oppositional in nature: advocates argued that single-sourcing technology from a mainframe vendor was causing business computing to be held hostage to one vendor’s idea of how things should work. Not only did this stifle innovation, it also did violence to the free market and free competition which, as we all know, drive down the cost of everything. With distributed computing, we were told, this great wrong would be righted. Users would write their own software. Hardware would become commoditized through natural market forces. Computing costs would plummet. There would be cake and ice cream for everyone!

No ice cream
Only, it didn’t quite work out that way. In 2011, roughly forty years after the distributed-computing revolution, the costs of distributed computing have only increased, especially in storage. Despite the onset of commoditization in drives and enclosures (all disks come from four OEMs these days; all chassis come from a half dozen or so enclosure-makers), array prices have accelerated at a rate of about 120 per cent per year. Part of the explanation is value-added software that vendors insist on joining to proprietary array controllers. Another part is the failure of the industry to define truly standardized interconnects, so that two switch providers can build products to a common standard with absolute certainty that they will work together in the same fabric.

But the real cost driver in storage is the lack of unified storage management. The singular feature of the mainframe environment that did not transfer into open-systems computing was a common management scheme that enabled dynamic resource-pooling and dynamic allocation of resources to application workloads in a highly manageable way. We don’t have unified storage management today, mainly because the industry doesn’t want us to.

Interchangable
Storage vendors don’t want to give the impression that everyone is selling boxes of commodity disks and that you could just as readily unplug their box and plug in their competitor’s box if the competing rig has a better feature set or price tag. Common management makes all rigs look the same—which, at the component level, they are. Over the years, marketing campaigns have tried to distract us from this point. For the past couple of years, vendors have re­focused our attention on shiny new things they are adding to their rigs. Flash SSD’s, or maybe sub-LUN tiering, being last year’s big advancement.

But the new message this spring is single source. In essence we are being told that, absent any sort of unified management, buying all gear from only one vendor is about the only thing that will drive down storage infrastructure costs. Cloud storage is just a variation on the same theme. Both of these ideas, which will surely be cultivated with lots of scientific-looking charts and graphs over the next few months, acknowledge the unwieldiness of storage from a management perspective and propose a solution to the problem that consists of abdicating responsibility for managing spindles altogether.

These ironic spring marketing initiatives inevitably favor large vendors possessing many lines of specialized storage kits. But how will the slogans bear up under the disinfecting sunlight of summer? Time will tell.

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22-02-2012 - Europees MKB benut opslagcapaciteit onvoldoende
Van alle kleine Europese bedrijven met 100 of minder werknemers heeft slechts 2 procent alle bedrijfstoepassingen naar de cloud gemigreerd. 85 procent heeft bedenkingen over een dergelijke stap. Dit blijkt uit gezamenlijk onderzoek van Dell en Intel.
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