The changing face of storage

No, we are not a storage company anymore. We are a data management company now.

I was reading a Forbes article interviewing NetApp’s CIO, Bill Miller. It was titled:

NetApp’s CIO Helps Drive Company’s Shift From Data Storage To Data Management

I was fairly surprised about the time it took for that mindset shift messaging from storage to data management. I am sure that NetApp has been doing that for years internally.

To me, the writing has been in the wall for years. But weak perception of storage, at least in this part of Asia, still lingers as that clunky, behind the glassed walls and crufty closets, noisy box of full of hard disk drives lodged with snakes and snakes of orange, turquoise or white cables. 😉

The article may come as a revelation to some, but the world of storage has changed indefinitely. The blurring of the lines began when software defined storage, or even earlier in the form of storage virtualization, took form. I even came up with my definition a couple of years ago about the changing face of storage framework. Instead of calling it data management, I called the new storage framework,  the Data Services Platform.

So, this is my version of the storage technology platform of today. This is the Data Services Platform I have been touting to many for the last couple of years. It is not just storage technology anymore; it is much more than that.

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Convergence data strategy should not forget the branches

The word “CONVERGENCE” is boiling over as the IT industry goes gaga over darlings like Simplivity and Nutanix, and the hyper-convergence market. Yet, if we take a step back and remove our emotional attachment from the frenzy, we realize that the application and implementation of hyper-convergence technologies forgot one crucial elementThe other people and the other offices!

ROBOs (remote offices branch offices) are part of the organization, and often they are given the shorter end of the straw. ROBOs are like the family’s black sheeps. You know they are there but there is little mention of them most of the time.

Of course, through the decades, there are efforts to consolidate the organization’s circle to include ROBOs but somehow, technology was lacking. FTP used to be a popular but crude technology that binds the branch offices and the headquarter’s operations and data services. FTP is still used today, in countries where network bandwidth costs a premium. Data cloud services are beginning to appear of part of the organization’s outreaching strategy to include ROBOs but the fear of security weaknesses, data breaches and misuses is always there. Often, concerns of the weaknesses of the cloud overcome whatever bold strategies concocted and designed.

For those organizations in between, WAN acceleration/optimization techonolgy is another option. Companies like Riverbed, Silverpeak, F5 and Ipanema have addressed the ROBOs data strategy market well several years ago, but the demand for greater data consolidation and centralization, tighter and more effective data management and data control to meet the data compliance and data governance requirements, has grown much more sophisticated and advanced. Continue reading