>> On Tue, 12 Jun 2007 03:20:18 -0400, Curtis Preston <cpreston AT GLASSHOUSE 
>> DOT COM> said:


> Pretty much everybody who is following the industry believes it will
> morph into the "intelligent disk target" industry.

I see this trend too.  It makes me think of ATM.  Remember ATM? :) Oy,
I sound like an old fart.  Sorry.  Topical, topical:

The problem I see with the intelligent disk target notion is that, the
smarter you try to get, the more management you have to do, and the
more statistical duplication you have to push under the covers.  How
would you feel if you had to map and tune RAID-5 regions between
platters?

And, (and here's the psychological kicker) the more you are out of
control of the actual processes.  This does not offend most
administrators of e.g. windows file-service servers: the performance
required is sufficiently modest, and the demand sufficiently diffuse,
that things like "Which platters is this coming from" never arise.

But if you really want to understand your performance and bottlenecks,
then you're in vendor motel land, with extra-price tools to "help"
you. :) It's a storage cloud, and just trust us, it'll all work out.
ATM.

For administrators accustomed to operating the presented interface,
this is not worrying.  For administrators accustomed to understanding
and controlling the underlying behavior, it is disconcerting, and in
the way.

This doesn't mean it won't be a great way to make money.  The
advantage to selling restricted and concealing interfaces is that you
can access a market which is incompetent to challenge you, and each
flaw in product version N can be a sales opportunity for N.1.  Witness
Windows.


- Allen S. Rout