january 17

Why are there no iPhones in storage?
I've been drooling over the Apple iPhone
GlassHouse Opinion by Jim Damoulakis, GlassHouse CTO

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9008285

Like many of you technology junkies out there, I've been drooling over the Apple iPhone trying to rationalize a way that I could justify such a purchase when it becomes available (darn, is there really no Exchange or Office document support?). Maybe I'm getting too old, but these days most technology product announcements just don't get me as excited as they once did -- this one was an exception.

Unlike consumer gadgets, storage products simply don't engender the same level of excitement -- let's face it, even the most whiz-bang disk array isn't nearly as sexy as a sleak, keyless, multifunctional pocket multimedia center (sigh). Part of the reason is that the line of product advancements is just too predictable: disks keep getting bigger, interface speeds get faster, etc. This doesn't mean that a lot of creative thought and development isn't happening in the production of storage technology, but it's very tough for a new, groundbreaking product to gain a solid foothold in the storage industry. It has taken several years for technologies like virtualization, data de-duplication, and continuous data protection to begin to truly break through and start to be seriously adopted. In part, achieving user acceptance for these technologies has been a challenge because the stakes are so much higher -- it's one thing for a Treo or iPhone to crash and reboot and quite another for a multiterabyte storage device running critical business applications. We are justifiably paranoid about data and need to be highly confident that a technology works before adopting it.

Beyond product maturity, however, there is another reason for the sluggish pace of storage technology adoption that is equally and, in some cases, even more significant: organizational maturity. Many storage infrastructures still behave in a largely reactive, ad hoc manner and are just not ready to successfully adopt new approaches despite potential benefits. The lack of formalized planning and operational processes coupled with the nonexistence of meaningful metrics related to capacity, consumption and cost results in environments where even the thought of introducing a new technology is too overwhelming to consider.

Fortunately, one does not have to ponder such weighty issues when considering the purchase of a shiny, new, groundbreaking personal handheld communicator…

Jim Damoulakis is chief technology officer at GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a leading provider of independent storage services. He can be reached at jimd@glasshouse.com