Our industry has made long strides in recent years.  There is no need for it to make a drastic change in its designs or how it does business, like some of our troubled domestic automakers.  Companies are buying all of the various offerings from the big storage vendors, and even some of the small ones.  It’s a growing market, and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

At least that’s the attitude that most companies will have when they’re asked if they will implement a new-fangled technology for their existing SANs.  Most firms have their critical systems on a SAN, and unless  there is a real need to, will not forklift upgrade their existing SANs.  That leaves the new technologies to attract  new clients, such as small business and small-to-medium enterprises (SME).  iSCSI is catching their eye now, and sure maybe FCoE will catch it later.  The key is still having devices that more than one protocol and interface, such as  those that use FC and iSCSI in order to attract the new but retain customers with existing investments.  Later perhaps, it will shift to FCoE and iSCSI, possibly Infiniband.  As a sidenote, I see the most bandwidth potential with fiber and Infiniband rather than copper.  Plus the cost of fiber continues to go down while copper costs are going up.  Fiber is smaller, but then again so was “Betamax”.

Evolution vs. Revolution
No one should expect the storage industry to make a drastic change unless a  start-up company comes along with revolutionary technology that really takes off and others take notice.  I believe that is unlikely since storage networks also rely on network technology which isn’t going to change overnight just for storage.  Afterall we’re moving back towards commonly used network technologies like IP and Ethernet for our Storage Networks!

I also feel it’s not accurate to think the storage industry is not improving daily.  We are not merely recreating what we started with, we are improving its reliability, performance, resiliance, flexibility, and utilization.  We are not mimicking evolution, there is no such thing.  To ignore all of the progress in hopes of a revolutionary shift seems to me as useful as questioning why we still use processors.  Granted quantum computing would be great, but how do you write code for something you don’t understand, let alone something that changes only once it’s observed?  Do you want your storage to be defragmented only when you observe it?

Thoughts on recent topics

Cloud computing will not take off in the financial industry or many other conservative industries.  They simply will  not rely on it to get critical data or services.  If your Internet is gone, it’s ALL GONE.  They just won’t tolerate that.  I’ve seen the Internet go down in all 3 of the biggest cities for an extended period, and so did a lot of people that will never be convinced to invest too much in “cloud computing”.

Deduplication is not simply compression.  It is inherently different.  It does so much more than just looking for repeated strings or bits and replacing them with a shortcut for “1000 spaces” for example.  It doesn’t end with each file or with each archive or backup.  Deduplication looks at every single block of data and determines if it has ever seen that block before, and if so replaces it with a reference to the original block.  After that you could even compress the deduped data.

As far as synchronization of files at home goes, a cloud with silver lining is called NAS with sync features enabled.  Have everything do a 2-way sync with the giant NAS.  If simplicity is desired, having 1 PC per person and a one-way upload from a “control device” such as an iPOD would be the way to go.

We Are The Industry
And for those of you who haven’t noticed — we ARE the industry, the big guys are asking us experts what we see coming around the corner, and they want to invest in developing and marketing that product.  No company wants to make the next “Betamax”, despite it being a better product than the others.  Sites like this are catching vendors’ attention and will change their minds.  Remember first comes expert opinions and recommendations, then vendor investment and production, and last comes recognition from customers.