Little by little, “convergence” is helping us take apart the myriad black boxes that have constituted IP infrastructure over the years, and rebuild them as infinitely more flexible, open and economical systems. Just as VoIP is being generally accepted as “mainstream,” the storage arena seems to be blossoming – and demanding our attention.
For us overworked IT infrastructure people, I suppose we should be happy that this is happening in successive, smaller waves rather than a tsunami. But just as we are getting our VoIP migrations under control, we have the gleaming vision of the “brave new world” of storage.
There is something to be said for the days when PBXs were black boxes – fed and cared for by an army of technicians from the AT&Ts and the Northern Telecoms of the world. All IT managers had to do was pay the bills. And because each system was a tightly bundled, proprietary affair, network specialists had little or nothing to do with it.
Not too long ago, the deconstruction of that “black box” forced us to expand our knowledge of voice-specific terminology. Although common lingo today, terms like vocoder, G.711 and PESQ/PSQM were enough to make most of our eyes glaze over.
Now that storage is moving to center stage, so, too, does another set of terms and acronyms. Fortunately, it is not as esoteric as VoIP.
Still, as with the old PBX, living in the age of black box, single-vendor, proprietary storage subsystems simplified life a bit (or a byte). Yes, you’d have to choose your vendor, but beyond haggling over “cost per terabyte” there was relatively little left to do.
As with the closed PBX-to-open-VoIP progression, we’ll ultimately be better off with deconstructed storage. But, as with VoIP, the burden is placed on the IT architects and technologists to understand fully the internal elements of storage.
If you’d managed up to now to avoid having to learn much about, say, Fibre Channel, SCSI and iSCSI, then be put on notice that you already might be starting to fall behind. If LUN, SATA and LTO mean nothing to you or the word “petabyte” hasn’t yet entered your vocabulary, then sit up and take notice. The storage steamroller is heading at you.
Even if you are reading this and thinking “Not me, I’m fine; my job is the network, someone else has to deal with storage,” you’d be wrong. The “storage people” have their eye on your network. After all, the next step of “convergence” has storage slated to run over a standard TCP/IP and Gigabit/10 Gigabit infrastructure.
I recently attended Storage Networking World, where, among other topics, there was a great deal of discussion about distributed file systems and replication. Now while much of this will take place in the “back end” over Fibre Channel networks or dedicated 10 Gigabit-Gigabit Ethernet links, that is not always the case.
Some offerings are targeted at LAN- and even WAN-based replication. While do-able, a “too quick” convergence of bandwidth-hungry storage on top of latency-sensitive VoIP could, without proper QoS and bandwidth management, lead your network to a convergence breakdown – and you to a nervous breakdown.
So if the network is in any way part of your job responsibility, storage better be on your radar screen.
