Storage Tiers – Take 3
I find myself in a true quandary. First, I have true admiration for my good friend and fellow blogger 3Par Farley and never feel comfortable being on the other side of the coin from him. Second, I find myself agreeing, to a degree, with Jon Toigo (who still uses crazy permalinks and considers Novell a serious storage player. What is up with that?).
I’m sure by now most of you all have read the fury lately over Tom Georgens’ comments about the future of storage tiering. A number of folks who have ‘tiering’ technology reacted with disdain (see a list on Storagerap). Some wondered how a storage visionary like Tom could turn his back on technology that helps people save money in storage. Some even suggested that this is just marketing to overcome deficiency in the NetApp product line. However, one applauded Tom for understanding how the real world deploys storage. All good points, but I have my own theory on storage teiring…
I want to come right out and say I think that storage tiering is an incredibly smart concept. (Now that that is off the table…) I would also say that much like the prediction that tape is ‘dead’ (I guess Data Domain didn’t get that memo), storage tiering, while it can’t be dead, because in reality, it never actually was, nor do I think it will be for a very long time. Let’s look at the facts:
First, HSM never really went anywhere. There is not mass adoption of HSM technology. Second, tiering is not a technology issue. Humans are lazy. What do I mean? HSM / Tiering or whatever you want to call it depends on policy. IT can’t get any two groups in a company to decide on anything other than storage is too expensive. When I speak to well respected people in IT the ‘real world’ (my dad), they tell me it is too difficult to get organizations to agree on when data can be archived in order to save money (and that is what this is all about really). Finally, IT processes get in the way of a good tiering strategy. Getting data to go one way is easy – move data to cheaper and cheaper tiers of storage until it vanishes. Try getting it back. That takes a lot of management tools and integration and costs just as much as doing nothing.
