A couple of things have recently struck me as interesting – the shared theme being that there’s more of interest than just the superficial details.
First, my colleague Terri McClure wrote a piece examining the features that our ESG research team has found users are most looking for in NAS systems. It generated plenty of animated written discussion; one of the commentators suggesting that “Flash is the least compelling storage technology in ESG survey” and that “flash SSDs ranked at the bottom of all the potential technologies people might buy”. Well, while admitting that I’m a big fan of solid state storage (both in limited use now, and much expanded use over time) my point is not to disagree with those who are less enthusiastic about the technology – I expect time to win that battle for me – but rather to remind us all to be careful of the conclusions we draw from various inputs. The real focus of the research quoted in Terri’s blog was to determine the extent to which certain features and attributes are absolute or preferred prerequisites for users purchasing NAS systems. It did not claim to be a complete list of all the technologies, just some that are becoming more essential in the minds of users. And, in this respect, when it came to flash drives 58% of the respondents chose to say either that they ‘would not purchase a NAS system without this attribute’ or that they ‘would strongly prefer a NAS system to include this attribute but would purchase one without it’. Frankly, I was surprised that flash had made it so far, so fast in the NAS community.
My second ’aha’ of late came after a couple of recent vendor briefings. While a strong list of partners seems to be de-riguer these days, the actual co-operation is often somewhat loose and indeed can be viewed as mutually-defensive (after all, it’s not really in anyone’s interest for things to not work together). It is a rather different thing than actually selling, or investing in, someone else’s stuff (per the old joke about the chicken and the pig’s contribution to breakfast it’s the difference between being involved and being committed!). It struck me as interesting that two of the more complete and impressive lists in these respects are at opposite ends of the storage spectrum. Both ProStor, with its removable RDX disk offering, and Fusion-io with it’s solid state drives, are tight in some form or fashion with the behemoths – HP, IBM and Dell. After my comments above, I’d hate to read too much into this of course – certainly, however, for all the advances in the mainstream technologies there’s always room for new approaches on all sides of storage.
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