Storage Monkeys

Whenever I traveled to Colorado Springs, their members were usually at the bar of the hotel and ALWAYS bought me a drink or two!

LOL RBruklis.

Was their any debate over the standards for mixing a Long Island Ice Tea?

Were the drinks water cooled, rapidly provisioned, stripped with a hot spare as opposed to having been deduped, compressed or thinly provisioned enabling sharing with others? Were the servers able to adjust to changing activity so that your response time or wait for refill was low, or, was the bar over-provisioned with congestion? Oh, and was the tab virtualized or printed from paper tape?

Perhaps their is still value in SNIA

SNIA provides "tools" to the industry which inludes knowledge, know-how, networking opportunities, standards, and education to list a few. SNIA does not provide individual organizations professional services, system integration, critique, or procurement specifics.
No organization or even SOHO/personal user desires to be in a data loss situation. SNIA has provided "tools" to industry to reduce the risk for data loss and to address data recovery. SNIA is not in a position to analyze or critique any specific organization's state of readiness for data protection, disaster recovery, data theft/loss as to why it happened, will it occur again, and what should have been in place, specifically for the selected infrastructure that is deployed, the procedures the IT operations ascribe to and so on. SNIA is just starting to put in place the "tools" for cloud, specifically DataStorage as a Service through the Cloud Storage Initiative and Cloud Technical Work group.
I, along with the many SNIA viewers following this blog thread, realize this response will draw more criticism and SNIA is fine with not trying to be all things to all people. However, SNIA is one of many places in industry to collaborate on new or expanded topics, through an vendor/employer agnostic active participation model. This includes the loyal bloggers at Storage Monkey and other collaborative environments for storage topics found throughout the web. SNIA is not a virtual technology and services corporation delivering and maintaining IT solutions. So, as unfortunate as any organization featured in the headlines any day of the year when it has an IT incident, SNIA is not the "first responder" to the situation --- instead it is rightfully the responsibility of the organization owning the data/IT infrastructure and their technology and service suppliers.
SNIA being a voice for industry does not translate into SNIA being a voice for every single facet of our industry. For example, SNIA today does not directly critique/applaud individual company product announcements, loggy legislation in any government body, nor critique any specific company's use of IT.
SNIA will defend its mission and purpose and also welcome constructive involvement to address topics and create more industry "tools". SNIA is not static, whereby what you see is what we always do; so if there is interest to create a set of best practices and whitepapers for anyone involved in delivering cloud services, SNIA is one of several industry collaborative environments that has the processes and collaborative infrastructure to have industry volunteers complete such a deliverable.
Regarding the friendly nature of SNIA volunteers and getting a good discussion going in a social setting, be it a local bar or the recent SNW (in Phoenix), we'll always be open to embrace those wanting to make a difference in industry, even if the difference does not occur under the roof of SNIA. Which is why SNIA also spends a lot of time with cross-industry alliances in support of common objectives.
SNIA reads all the headlines including those for data loss, tapes off the back of the truck, the latest act of God and nature, brownouts --- SNIA is not a news publisher or an opinion columnist --- so, lack of immediate postings in blogs or issuing an opportunistic press release does not mean the discussion is not happening either within the relevant parts of SNIA where the topic has direct relevancy. Yes, at SNW, enough references were made to the most recent headlines on mainstage and in the cloud sessions and SNIA Cloud Birds of a Feather session.
SNIA also appreciates the blogs, such as Storage Monkey, to keep an active dialogue going on 365 days a year, in an open manner for everyone to share --- we get good ideas from them and also are proud to see SNIA advocates participate throughout these blogs to help everyone know our value, so messages don't always have to come from the top and be wrongly perceived as sugar-coated or hollow intentions.
If there is a desire to meet with SNIA leaders face to face in coming weeks and months on how to engage the SNIA volunteerism model, we'll be SNW Europe in October, in Silicon Valley for various meetings November, December, January.
Wayne M. Adams, SNIA Chairman , www.snia.org

Wayne said "SNIA provides "tools" to the industry..."

That's fine and that's a worthy mission but that doesn't make SNIA "truly the voice of the storage industry". Is it all just inside baseball or is there an external mission to evangelize innovations within the industry? If so, Tim is right, this was an opportunity to talk about the benefits of cloud storage to a media that is rather ill-informed about cloud storage.

Cloud is a compelling business model. Any point in time setback, in my opinion, will not significantly change the momentum. It will sharpen the focus on making it better.
Maybe not the perfect analogy, but the early days of PCs had its issues with chips and floating point math, operating system stability and so on. Evenutally, PC based components evolved, became hardened...changing from low cost - good enough; to low cost - toppling other technologies (such as minicomputers). Many of today's HPC configurations and web2.0 are based on PC components in a rack and stack and aggregate and scale-out configuration. There is still room for innovation and improvement with PC components, OS, etc...
Cloud is now on its journey, maybe v2.0 of the xSP days. Where it will be 5,10,15, 20 years from now will depend on the right balance of technology and business models. Cloud would not be attractive today due to the cost, economics and timeperiod to amortize a bullet-proof/fail-proof configuration that rivals what the most demanding environments from Wall Street to the Pentagon to mainstreet. SNIA has already put forth planning points and tools pertaining to security, data mobility/recoverability, SLA, and shared tenancy. (Take some time to review the SNIA tutorials, SNIA security best practice papers, etc...).
Regarding the comment SNIA should be working with the Media. Well, guess what, we have been briefing the media for the past 2 weeks about SNIA CSI and SNIA CDMI. There is never a guarantee a media person will publish what you brief.
I'm sure many of you who blog question why not all viewpoints are picked up on. Sometimes facts and commonsense information are news-worthy/sexy/attention grabbing headlines.
As I said in my original post, we aren't all things to all people. We get ideas from shared, public posts such as Storage Monkey. We don't take every recommendation for what SNIA should do as our action item list. If you believe SNIA should be doing certain things, please take time to join one of the many SNIA activity areas and make contributions so your visions and desires become reality.
Wayne

Having read both the original post and the rebuttals posted by Wayne, I can't help but return to my original thoughts after having read Wayne's first comments ...you're missing the point.

There are very few of us in the storage industry (myself included) who want anything less than for SNIA to succeed. Having a vendor neutral body such as SNIA is hugely useful given the ever increasing amounts of FUD vendors throw at one another. Given the complexity of cloud adoption ...and what cloud promises to deliver in the future, not the least of which could be significant revenues ...it is unlikely that vendor FUD will decrease but, rather, increase exponentially. To that end, hurrah for SNIA and all who sail in her.

That said, the point of the original post by Tim, if I interpret it correctly is ...how can SNIA launch a Cloud Storage Initiative with a view to providing vendor agnostic industry leadership in a critical area for cloud adoption and then say absolutely nothing about the Microsoft Sidekick failure?

To say nothing dilutes SNIA leadership and, as my dear old grandfather used to say ...'If you aren't the lead horse, the view is always the same.'

SNIA will not be making direct comments to Microsoft or Sidekick. This is not due a few opinions in a blog about what leadership is and is not. I encourage you all to rally your voices into a larger voice and become a larger voice of industry.
Not everyone has the time to cull through threads to find out how large the voice is, right or wrong about the point to be voiced.
For anyone creating data, have more than one copy around, e.g. 2 or more, in addition to the active set. This applies to anyone with smartphones --- think about the portability of the data, loss of the service from the service provider side, and possible corruption of the device itself. Worst case, if you need to rebuild your environment on a new device with a new service provider, how this will get done. Plan for the worst case. When nothing is amiss, all the import/export, restore happen automagically to the smartphone owner. When something is amiss, besure to understand your service contracts for warranties, SLA, and liabilities.
Nothing in our lives is 100% guaranteed, including data and IT stewardship of someone elses. Analogies have been made, will Cloud computing usher in FDIC like protections found in banking, that most people are covered if a bank goes out of business. ..and finding something fitting for Cloud computing and data loss. FDIC only goes to a few $$K, and those fortunate to have more, need additional strategies to preserve their $$K. Similarly, in data protection, no protection is obviously not feeling good. Having one set of data being protected feels better. Having more sets of data further reduces risk, but never eliminates it. 911 proved quite a lesson in DR...all the datacenters failed over, but the personnel were stuck in traffic with the passwords.

Regarding the point, SNIA being a voice in industry. SNIA never has claimed to be "the one and only voice", nor the most authorative voice. However, we do express our voice on topics and you can find them in a number of managed google group topics, StorTOC, EPA energy star progam, and in industry events like SNW. SNIA does not need to have a voice on everything in the industry to be effective, to be of value, etc... For those thinking otherwise, I would imagine your expectations are similar of the US Government is everything to everyone and is a failure everyday someone goes hungry, has a crime committed against a citizen, or has a brownout in their community.
Thanks for the opportunity to share more SNIA information.
Wayne

Simply put then, based on Wayne's comments, SNIA is really just an industry group with no desire to be the voice voice of the industry. Too bad, we need a group that is evangelizing technology innovations and doing some external education but also has buy-in from the industry. If SNIA won't fill that void, someone will.

SNIA Mission and Charter for Cloud Storage Initiative and Technical Work Group are public record. (for those insisting SNIA doesn't have scope of effort)
SNIA press briefing materials and whitepapers are public record as well (for those in the blog that insist SNIA is not engaging the media and off/on insist the Microsoft Sidekick headline is a catalyst for more action or just a red herring).
Too bad too many blogs today desire to be a place to discuss topics while they degrade into bait , taunt, and slam exercises.
I hope our dialog has increased your blog readership.
Wayne

Wayne: I'm not sure you are interpreting what's being said. If I read Tim correctly, he's stating an affirmative comment about SNIA and how SNIA might be able to increase it's outreach and leveraging the interest being raised by the Microsoft data loss. I think he's right - if outreach is going to be an active rather than a passive activity, then this was a missed opportunity.

You disagree and think that SNIA should not be commenting about a major story on the cloud. I think that's OK too - it's your call to make and you are defining what is in bounds and out of bounds for SNIA.

For context: I've been in various levels of sys admin for nearly 12 years now and I have heard of SNIA, but I never knew what it was or what they did. Even going to your web site this week, it seems more like an industry thing and not really an association for people who use storage. I joined Storage Monkeys looking to network with other users and to get deeper intel on different technologies (not sure if I've found it here but I'm giving it time). I think the questions about SNIA's relevance are reasonable and hardly a bait and slam thing.