Storage manager's conundrum

IBM buys XIV, HP snatches 3Par, Dell acquires EqualLogic, IBM buys Netezza, Isilon is part of EMC. All these changes in a short span of 3 - 6 months. If as a storage manager you are scratching your head, you are not alone. This is a hot segment of IT industry. The silver lining in all this is - more options. Technology upheavals from such upstarts have brought breath of fresh air for storage managers. New technologies are fundamentally changing storage paradigms. Thin provisioning, wide striping, virtualization, deduplication, compression, grid processing, ssd, FCoE, pNFS, Hadoop are offering so many choices that didn't exist before

So what should you do? Start with enterprise architecture, where business objectives are mapped down to the application, information, data and infrastructure architecture. Cliche' alert - change for the sake of change is of no value.

Rational approach: Understand the data profile - IOPS, availability, recoverability, retention requirement, unstructured vs structured data, virtualization goals, compressable/uncompressable data, growth forecasts, application service levels, OLAP/DSS vs OLTP ratio before making the decision. Try listing the non-functional requirements of the infrastructure - maintainability, risk tolerance, service strategies, service maturity of the organizations before making the decision. As the statistics tell more than 50 percent of the mergers / acquisitions fail, wait sometime before you board the bandwagon for new technologies post merger. Ask the acquirer to share the roadmap (NDA would be required), and verify long term commitment to product.

Future Proof: Consider future proofing you storage by virtualizing it, HP SVSP or HDS USP V are good offerings, which virtualize storage at the block level, providing storage mobility. NFS is a highly mobile storage protocol, and can also allows flexibility.

Stick to your roadmap Bottom line is stick to your roadmap, don't take every turn that comes on the road, bake in sometime in your roadmaps for periodic evaluations, which keeps it flexible enough to check out new technologies but structure enough for the team to carry forward with a strategy.