Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Proof of Concepts and Bakeoffs

If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the gear.™

Storage is the slowest resource in the datacenter. We measure things in milliseconds, while other components are in micro or nanoseconds. We’re increasingly asked to push more and more data through pipes faster and faster. When storage fails: screens go blue, kernels panic, things get ugly. Some call this a resume generating event.

For this reason, storage professionals as a general rule are a conservative bunch. We resist change. We want things to be safe and mature with low risk and no bugs. We avoid the bleeding edge. Some wait months or years after new products are released before they considering deploying them.

This approach doesn’t always serve us well.