Like Oxygen

Articles like this make me furious; they appear to simply ignore the core desire of most storage users and could only be written by either 

    1) a vendor

    2) a consultant selling a SRM audit

    3) a storage administrator trying to keep themselves employed

Dimitris talks about simplifying things but it still relies on too much thought and impacts business agility and how quickly I can do things.

As a large storage user, let me spell it out to you...

I don't care about tiers, I don't want to care about putting my data in the right place, I just want to store my data. 

However, I also want it

    1) To be available to my business when I need it

    2) To perform according to my demands

    3) To be as cost-effective as possible

    4) Be completely transparent to whatever application I put on it and not need special 'integration'     points.

I do not want to

    1) Employ hundreds of people to do this

    2) Need a degree in advanced quantum mechanics to manage it

    3) To melt the polar ice-caps to cool it, power it etc

    4) Cover the whole of known world in data centres to house it

However I do not care if

    1) You fill it full of little gnomes who move the data around

    2) You give your staff back-rubs and make them feel fulfilled in their daily lives

    3) You love your mums

It be extremely cool if you did do all that but it'll probably not sway my decision either way! (Okay, little gnomes moving the data around, that'd be too cool and yes, I'd buy it just for that).

So that is my ultimate desire for storage; it should be just be there and works, completely transparently to the user.

And yes, this is really, really hard to do! The work that will need doing behind the scenes is incredibly complex but ultimately data-storage needs to become like oxygen! 

p.s You didn't really make me furious Dimitris...but hey, we all need some hyperbole in our blogs!