One of the things I've learned, having been in more traditional "Enterprise" environments and "Internet" companies is that the latter have much larger scale issues, with respect to storage, by an order of magnitude or two, than the former.
Want to know the storage news from Australia and New Zealand over the last week?
Here goes.
To start off from the beginning, I'm a regular reader over at Gestalt IT. "So what is Gestalt IT" you may wonder now. Well, on their website you will find the following:
We are collecting the best analysis and commentary from leaders in the fields of virtualization, networking, storage, and desktop engineering....We work with independent experts, bloggers, and writers to generate content focused on IT infrastructure topics. Many of our articles and posts are syndicated from the blogs of their authors, meaning that they select their best and most relevant work and transmit it to us using an RSS feed, just like Google Reader and other feed readers use. Posts are then formatted and edited for publication here.
So, you could call it an agregate of posts that are collected and submitted by people who know their stuff in things IT.
Although myself and others here at Storage Monkeys have been railing about the need for transparency and honesty among bloggers, surprisingly few have adopted any ethical standards for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. The lack of disclosure is bad for the storage industry, it's bad for vendors, it's bad for the bloggers and it's real bad for the commercial publications that refuse to develop any standard for disclosure.
The title of this post was my first thought when I received the invitation to join the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day.
To start off from the beginning, I'm a regular reader over at Gestalt IT. "So what is Gestalt IT" you may wonder now. Well, on their website you will find the following:
The sky is falling! Cloud storage and computing are the next Hindenburg! Run for your lives! Or so some analysts, news agencies, and bloggers would have you believe.
Whilst there have certainly been some very high profile cloud computing failures in T-Mobile’s Sidekick, as well as Google Gmail and Google Apps several times throughout 2009, it is important to put some things in perspective.
Francis Fukuyama wrote 'The End of History and the Last Man' in which he famously postulated that, as far as systems of government and markets were concerned we had reached the 'end of history' ...democracy and the free market had defeated all comers and, as far as Francis was concerned, the only thing left open to debate was how to implement such systems and what controls were required for regulation. The book became a bit of a touchstone and rallying point for what would become known as 'neo-cons', but as time has marched on many of Francis' original assertions have been challenged by the likes of Robert Kagan in 'The Return of History and the End of Dreams' ...as well as real world events like 11 September, the Iraq war, and the recent economic recession. The end of history? Doubtful. Just as surely as we have debated systems of government and markets since Greek and Roman times, so we will surely debate them in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
Whats this got to do with storage?
About two weeks back (Friday October 2nd to be exact), I received an e-mail from Erin Capellman. She's one of the people working for EMC and seems to be at least partially, if not even full time, responsible for the EMC community network.
Basically it's the same as a lot of other online communities. People meet in a digital environment and exchange ideas, meet peers and get new information. Something that can be quite useful and add a lot of value to projects you are working on.
To start, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I want the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to succeed. We all (users, vendors and everyone in between) need a group like this to work. It's in our collective best interests.
My concern is that SNIA is going through the motions of it's mission, but it is failing and it's only kidding itself if they they believe they are relevant outside of their bubble. On their web site, they claim that "SNIA is truly the voice of the storage industry on a worldwide scale".
CLOUD FAIL #1: This would be funny if it weren't such a data disaster: According to multiple news reports, an HDS SAN upgrade at Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick, went bad and it appears that the emails, photos, calendars, photos and contacts of Sidekick owners is lost. How data is COMPLETELY lost on a SAN is beyond me. Sure, some moron may have skipped his Data Center 101 class and not setup a backup... but do you realize how many things have to go wrong for a complete system failure to happen without a major physical disaster? While the "told ya so" techies flex their muscles on this issue, there is certainly more to this story then we know now.
