StorageGRID gets gritty

[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at the event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]

NetApp® presented StorageGRID® Webscale (SGWS) at Storage Field Day 19 last month. It was timely when the general purpose object storage market, in my humble opinion, was getting disillusioned and almost about to deprive itself of the value of what it was supposed to be.

Cheap and deep“, “Race to Zero” were some of the less storied calls I have come across when discussing about object storage, and it was really de-valuing the merits of object storage as vendors touted their superficial glory of being in the IDC Marketscape for Object-based Storage 2019.

Almost every single conversation I had in the past 3 years was either explaining what object storage is or “That is cheap storage right?

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The transcendence of Data Fabric

The Register wrote a damning piece about NetApp a few days ago. I felt it was irresponsible because this is akin to kicking a man when he’s down. It is easy to do that. The writer is clearly missing the forest for the trees. He was targeting NetApp’s Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) and missing the entire philosophy of NetApp’s mission and vision in Data Fabric.

I have always been a strong believer that you must treat Data like water. Just like what Jeff Goldblum famously quoted in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way“, data as it moves through its lifecycle, will find its way into the cloud and back.

And every storage vendor today has a cloud story to tell. It is exciting to listen to everyone sharing their cloud story. Cloud makes sense when it addresses different workloads such as the sharing of folders across multiple devices, backup and archiving data to the cloud, tiering to the cloud, and the different cloud service models of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and XaaS.

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