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Working Toward a C-4 Summit |
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StorageTV is proud to be involved in the forthcoming C-4 Summit being planned by the Data Management Institute. C-4 refers to the issues on the frontburner of most companies today:
- Cost Containment
- Compliance
- Continuity
- Carbon Footprint Reduction (Green IT)
C-4 issues must be addressed by a strategy of business-savvy innovation and a phased implementation model. Companies will not undo overnight what has taken years to put into place. Specifically, we need a three-pronged strategy covering:
- Purpose-building of infrastructure
- Comprehensive enterprise infrastructure management
- Data management and intelligent archiving
Sponsorship offers are beginning to be received from the vendors with whom we have discussed the program concept. Xiotech, CA, DataCore Software, Hitachi Server Systems, and Zerowait are showing interest early on. Learn more about the C-4 Summit here, and learn all about the C-4 Initiative here.
StorageTV will help spread the word and will capture the proceedings as clips for review after the event. |
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The Purpose-Built Storage Initiative is an on-going effort of Toigo Partners and the Data Management Institute to find ways to right-size storage infrastructure and to map storage choices and investments more closely to business objectives and applications.
We hold certain truths to be self evident:
- One size fits most storage products never fit anyone's needs very well.
- Examination of business processes and applications yields all of the information one needs to develop a set of storage requirements. Fitting applications to infrastructure after infrastructure is built almost never provides a good fit of technology to data.
- The core elements of storage are the same: spinning rust, spinning plastic or streaming mylar. These are commodity components.
- The industry cobbles these components into finished goods that join proprietary "value add" software at the hip to proprietary controllers in order to lock in the customer and lock out the competition. (This is an actual quote of a former EMC CEO from a presentation he made in Santa Barbara, California in 2001 before an assembly of venture capitalists and investment bankers. We aren't making this up.)
- Purpose-building storage requires the deconstruction of array "systems." Some services provided on-array today need to become services deployed in a network so that they can be extended to all storage platforms, not isolated to select storage silos.
- To make purpose-built storage work, cross-platform management must be a forethought, not an afterthought. We like developments in the realm of web services that portend to connect applications to network-based storage resources and services. Until a comprehensive web services model is created, however, there are very good SRM tools available in the market today.
- Management plus purpose-built storage can drive substantial cost out of storage technology, which currently consumes between 30 and 70 cents of every dollar spent on IT hardware and accounts for the lion's share of electricity used to power IT infrastructure.
- Management can be used as a selection criterion for storage investments. If the gear being proposed by a vendor cannot be managed using the storage management tools adopted as a corporate standard by your shop, don't buy it. This compels vendors to cooperate and to support a common storage management approach, something that SNIA's Storage Management Initiative has utterly failed to do.
- Purpose-building storage goes hand in hand with data management and intelligent archiving to drive out cost and improve both allocation and utilization efficiency in storage investments.
- Purpose-built storage requires IT to do some of the integration that they currently outsource to vendors. It lacks the appeal of the "one stop shop" or "one throat to choke" approach that has been popular in recent years, but it also eliminates vendor lock-in, overpayment for value-add features that you don't use, and lack of common management that increases OPEX costs for storage.
StorageTV is proud to support this important effort. |
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Look, we aren't trying to be a pain here at StorageTV, but sifting through the vendor marketecture to get to the real architecture in storage technology product offerings is often a painful and time consuming task. In addition to the expected spin-doctoring and hype, a lot of vendor marketing literature contains downright disinformation -- about other vendors and their products, and about the vendor's own wares.
Putting vendor spokespersons in front of the camera seems to make them think twice. They are no longer anonymous advocates. They are no longer shielded from interaction. They have no PowerPoint presentations to hide behind. A certain reality is conferred by the video recording experience. There is no dodging the unblinking eye of the camera. Nuances of gesture and vocal intonation and facial expression are there for all to see.
Then there is the matter of permanence. StorageTV videos are not going to disappear. What was said in a clip today will still be around in a year or two. Juxtapositioning older clips with newer ones can be illuminating, as well as damning -- perhaps in a more powerful way than can be accomplished in the print media.
So, we aren't exaggerating when we say to those vendors who ask to be on StorageTV, "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
Know what you want to say in advance.
We can let you know the questions we are probably going to ask in an interview, so there will be no "gotchas." But truth be told, some new questions are almost always generated as follow-ons to things you say or quips you make. Our interviews are not pre-scripted.
Bottom line: we are delighted by the interest shown by the vendor community in being on-camera on this site. But, you need to be prepared to answer questions with honesty and forthrightness if you decide to get in front of our lense.
'Nuf said. |
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