I just want to share a simple graph of what I wrote about in my previous blog entry. I think a picture is worth a thousand words. Have a look at the graph below. I found this in the “Cloud Storage for Dummies” book sponsored by HDS. Full credits to the authors of the book.
Interesting, isn’t it?
An interesting question popped into my head yesterday. With all this push into the Cloud, the customer does not own most of the computer equipment. They are just getting services and when they want storage, do you think they care whether their storage is on a SAN or NAS?
I have mentioned this before, Cloud makes a lot of IT stuff irrelevant. Read my previous blog. This means that the demand for IT techies, sysadmins, consultant will suddenly be squeezed into who’s very good, good, not-so-good and the downright bad ones. Let’s the survival-of-the-fittest games begin!
Yes, the SAN and NAS, or even unified storage story doesn’t hold much weight anymore. However, to the cloud service provider, they will be out there looking for what is best for their bottom line, whether it will be a branded box or just a white box if they are willing to build the storage on their own. For those providers who have strong financials, obviously investing in premium brands like EMC, IBM, NetApp, and so on, makes sense because they need someone to blame and penalize when the shit hits the fan. For those who doesn’t have the financial prowess, this presents a whole new economy that resellers, partners, distributors can tap on to – build for these cloud providers at a cheaper price (hint, hint).
However, storage relies on a strong storage operating system to do just that. They are plenty of open source ones. Hey, you can practically build a simple iSCSI or NAS box with Linux. Consumer grade NAS such as NetGear, Synology and DLink have been using open-source Linux to penetrate the low-end, home storage market for years. The cloud providers will be a different ballgame, but the storage piece is fundamentally the same.
Things are changing folks, and for those consultants, product pre-sales, post-sales, sysadmins, operators of storage, you have to evolve to meet this new market. SAN and NAS do not matter anymore when customers are using the cloud services.
p/s: I have been spending time looking at some very, very cool cloud-ready storage operating systems. If you have the time, leave me a comment and we’ll talk. 😀
This has been bugging me for a long time and I have to let it out.
First of all, cloud computing can mean a million things coming from different people. I am still in a haze sometimes of where this cloud thingy could lead too. Every IT vendor is “cloud-something” and I am not going to contest that because I am no cloud expert myself.
But one thing is imminent. The entire landscape from the IT infrastructure to the economics of IT, is changing into the utility model. This-as-a-Service, That-as-Service and so on. Customers and companies are beginning to realize the opportunity and the ability to lease IT services as a pay-as-you-use utility just like any public utility such as electricity and water.
In IT, we are used to the model of manufacturer –> vendor —> distributor –> reseller –> end customer. This has been the scheme of things and for those of us working as professionals for vendors, distributors and resellers, that’s our livelihood. But the cloud computing model is in the horizon. We are not too far off from such a scheme, where IT is operated as a utility company. This means that IT is directly provisioned to the end customer, likely to be bypassing the reseller model. Suddenly the model becomes manufacturer –> end customer. You get it, right?
We can still include the vendor, distributor and reseller into the new cloud computing landscape, but there is little value-add, and with market dynamics, the end customer would want to get their IT services supply directly from the manufacturer, in this case, the cloud service provider.
So where does that leave us? We could be the end-user OR we could work for a cloud service provider. That would mean little differentiation for IT engineers and sysadmins, IT sales reps and marketing people.
But this is not a doom-and-gloom story. In my opinion, this is the best time for IT geeks and nerds to become one notch better. Know your subject well in what you do, learn and grow your knowledge in the right direction, AND be DAMN good! That is where we can differentiate ourselves; move ourselves up the value chain and enhance our position. Don’t take the easy way out and be one of the ordinary. Be X-TRAordinary!!!
I was chatting with a friend yesterday and we were discussing about virtualization and cloud, the biggest things that are happening in the IT industry right now. We were talking about the VMware vSphere 5 arrival, the cool stuff VMware is bringing into the game, pushing the technology juggernaut farther and farther ahead of its rivals Hyper-V, Xen and Virtual Box.
And in the technology section of the newspaper yesterday, I saw news of Jaring OneCloud offering and one of the local IT players just brought in Joyent. Fantastic stuff! But for us in IT, we have been inundated with cloud, cloud and more cloud. The hype, the fuzz and the reality. It’s all there but back to our conversation. We realized that virtualization and cloud aren’t much without storage, the cornerstone of virtualization and cloud. And in the storage networking layer, there are the data management piece, the information infrastructure piece and so on and yet … why are there so few storage networking professional out there in our IT scene.
I have been lamenting this for a long time because we have been facing this problem for a long time. We are facing a shortage of qualified and well experienced storage networking professionals. There are plenty of jobs out there but not enough resources to meet the demand. As SNIA Malaysia Chairman, it is my duty to work with my committee members of HP, IBM, EMC, NetApp, Symantec and Cisco to create the awareness, and more importantly the passion to get the local IT’s storage networking professional voice together. It has been challenging but my advice to all those people out there – “Why be ordinary when you can become extra-ordinary?”
We have to make others realize that storage networking is what makes virtualization and cloud happen. Join us at SNIA Malaysia and be part of something extra-ordinary. Storage networking IS the foundation of virtualization and cloud. You can’t exclude it.
