Will storage go the way of the server?
Posted Friday, September 11, 2009 in News 0 comments
If you're in the virtualization business, or you are considering how virtualization will impact your future, you need to study “The Future of Storage: How cloud computing, virtualization, storage efficiency, flash solid state disk and the rise of scale-out architectures change the economics of managing data growth”.
I'll warn you, it's >100 pages. Unlike far too many 100 page analyst reports, it isn't the same 20 pages refactored 5 times, so you really do want to look at it all. But it will be worth your time.
A number of the ideas that drove us to create Virsto Software a couple years ago are discussed in this report.
This report comes from TechAlpha's Juergen Urbanski and George Gilbert. I'd met George an eon ago when he was a star equity analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston, which was banking my software company's IPO. Juergen's experience at McKinsey and NetApp put him in a great position to develop insights into the market where Virsto operates.
Most analysts analyze “what is”, or when they're prognosticating, “what will be soon”. They have a remarkably static worldview, where projections are simple extrapolations. For well-established industries, this is generally a reasonable way to think.
But in an industry that is predicated on innovation, that mode of thinking will always kill you. Especially in a segment like virtualization that is still in its infancy. Believing that the past predicts the future is a sure fire way to be spectacularly wrong.
In the conservative storage industry, almost all “forecasting” is done by grizzled veterans whose eyes are fixated on the rear view mirror.
Not long ago most experts thought that deduplication would never catch on, that the big guys like EMC and NetApp who make a whole lot of money from data duplication would never allow dedupe to succeed as a technology or for Data Domain to succeed as a company. Boy, did the recent multi-billion dollar bidding war between EMC and NetApp for Data Domain disprove that theory!
There are plenty of other examples. 10-ish years ago, Steve Jobs was considered washed up and a poor businessman. Scott McNealy was the smartest guy in high tech. Today, fanbois genuflect at the whisper of Jobs' name, and McNealy's written off as a latter-day Ken Olsen, a man famous for having built, then led to ignominy, one of the greatest computer companies in history.
What's my point? That to see the future requires real analysis, and more importantly, real vision. That it is foolish to envision the future of storage and virtual computing by trivial extrapolation from the present. That Juergen and George are smart analytical cookies with vision.
Disclosure: I spoke with Juergen and George while they were preparing this report, and Virsto Software is mentioned in the document. Except for having paid TechAlpha $99 for a copy of a previous report ("Ripple Effects From Virtualization", also highly recommended), we're not a TechAlpha customer. And while I like their stuff, I don't agree with all of it.
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