The Storage Muse

I’m always looking for alignment of ideas or logic or thoughts across a variety of disciplines.  For instance in past posts like “The Dance” I talked about the offload characteristics of electronics and showed an equivalent example in offloading typing to your hands — kind of let your fingers do the walking.  In this case I’m pointing to Rand’s latest post on using the right tool for the right job.  His prose opens by talking about using chain saws versus using a hand saw.  The important point about using a chainsaw versus a hand saw is that the chainsaw is vastly more efficient and speedier than the hand saw.  (That is unless you are a fan of inefficiency and there are cases for this like being a competitor in a Lumber Jack contest.)  Further Rand’s points out that the person who only has a hand saw at his/her disposal will only think that a hand saw can solve their problem and will never know a world where the speed and efficiency of using a chainsaw rule supreme.

Now I went to the trouble for all of this to talk about one of our competitors who is solving storage problems with their own hand saw: NetApp with OnTap.  Interestingly I’ve already talked about this kind of thing in the past.  Specifically Rand’s thoughts are aligned to mine in my previous post.  Ro rehash for a minute, for NetApp everything can be solved with OnTap and a NetApp appliance.  OnTap can solve all disparate storage problems for a variety of different verticals and spaces with one approach. Folks you need the right tool for the right job and I’m convinced that NetApp’s uni-architecture is not it.  The reality is that for storage you need different architectures to solve different problems domains.  That is why you see the leaders in the Enterprise storage market (Hitachi, EMC and IBM) all with architectures that vary per segment and type.  In this way I classify the USP-V class systems to the highest end chainsaw and the NetApp appliances to that saw which is used in a Lumberjack contest.

UPDATE

Note that there is a similar line of thinking on Seth’s Blog.  His add to the conversation is knowing when to switch tools or hammers in his case.  So the additive thing on top of Rand’s logic would be learning how to switch from the hand saw to the chainsaw and then further switching from one type of chainsaw to another one.  Further the additive thing on top of my logic of needing the right storage architecture for the right job would be having different storage architectures for different kinds of tasks and then knowing when to switch to them.  Well because I cannot resist, perhaps now is the right time to consider switching from the hand saw of the storage market to company that can offer the right architectures to solve your storage problems.