Politics and Storage, or, storage in an election year V2.008

One of the disadvantages of travel, particularly air travel today is time spent waiting, however, instead of worrying about lost time waiting, time waiting can also be time to think, ponder, watch CNN, FOX, CNBC, BBC, Sky, or what ever your preference, think and ponder some more.

Lately with the coverage on the U.S. elections this year, with the debate coverage?s, candidate mud slinging and fud, claims, counter claims, statistics and studies to cite, different pundits and analysts as well as media coverage and perspectives (and its only the primaries), it occurred to me, that the IT industry and storage or storage networking in general has a lot more in common with politics than might be noticed. After all, take a look at data storage or storage networking or storage networking or however you want to classify, there are opposing views, special interests and lobbies (e.g. trade groups), left vs. right, conservative vs. liberal, independent vs. establishment and so forth. For example, on the storage and I/O networking front, you have Ethernet vs. Fibre Channel, or, iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel vs. NAS or NAS vs. iSCSI vs. DAS, iSCSI vs. FCoE vs. InfiniBand. (Check out I/O I/O it?s off to virtual work we go)

Then there are the tape vs. disk or disk vs. MAID or disk vs. SSD debates or managed service provider vs. do it yourself, not to mention the platform and vendor debates or what to refer to a product as such as a switch or director or platform or fabric. Another is the dedup debates of when to dedupe or not, where and how to dedupe, or how about to green IT and storage or to address power and cooling issues, probably the same yet like many politicians on all sides of the table, there is a disconnect between issues and messaging, such as the growing green gap between vendors green messages not aligning with IT customers pain points of power, cooling, floor space, recycling, energy efficiency which if you step back, both sides have common intentions, its how the message is not connecting.

Rest assured, we are only in early February and already things are heating up on both the political front as well as IT and data storage or data infrastructures fronts which should make for an interesting show and conference season leading up to the fall elections and storage selections, that is, unless the vendors unlike the politicians simply show up to sit around the campfire and singing kumbya while together only to leave and return to their debates on the battlefield.

Cheers
Greg Schulz ? www.storageio.com