Does the Storage Tecchnology Really Matter?

This article is really more of a rant.  Take it for what it is.  I’m just a frustrated infrastructure admin trying to choose a storage product.

I am not a storage admin (and I don’t play one on TV), but I am on our storage replacement project representing the server infrastructure area.  In preparation for this project, I started reading a number of the more popular blogs and following some of the storage Tweeters.  One thing I noticed is that all the banter seems to be about speeds and feeds as opposed to solving business problems.  In the case of Twitter, I am guessing it’s due to the 140 character limit, but I would expect to see more in the blogs.  Some of the back & forth reminds me of the old elementary school bravado along the lines of “My dad can beat up your dad”.

I must admit that I am learning a lot, but does it really matter if it supports iSCSI, FC, FCoE, NFS, or other acronyms?  As long as it fits into my existing infrastructure with minimal disruption and provides me options for growth (capacity and features), should I care?   If so, why should I care? We recently moved the bulk of our data center to Cisco UCS so you would think that FCoE would be a highly valued feature of our new solution.  But it’s not.  We don’t run Cisco networking gear and our current gear provider has no short term plans for FCoE.  Given that we just finished a network upgrade project, I don’t forsee FCoE in our environment for at least three years unless funding magically appears.  It doesn’t mean that it isn’t on our radar; it just means that it won’t be here for at least three years.  So stop trying to sell me on FCoE support.

So who has the better solution?  I am going to use EMC and NetApp in my example just because they blog/tweet a lot.

I think if one were to put a chart together, both EMC and NetApp could be at the heading of any column.  Their products look the same to me.  Both have replication software, both support snapshots, both support multiple protocols, and so on and so on and so on.  The features list is pages long and each vendor seems to match the other.

There are technical differences in how these features are implemented and in how the back-end arrays work, but should I care?  Tell me how these features will help my business grow.  Tell me how these features will protect my business.  Tell me how these features will save my business money. Tell me how they can integrate into my existing infrastructure without having to change my infrastructure.  And when I say “tell me”, don’t just say “it can do this”, or “it can do that”.  Give me case studies more than six pages long, give me processes and procedures, and give me REAL metrics that I can replicate/validate (assuming I had the equipment and time) in a real-world scenario which information telling me how they affect my apps and customers.

This is an area where companies need to do a better job of marketing.  EMC started down this path with the vBlock.  Techies aren’t really interested because the specs are blasé.  C-level folks love it because it marketed towards them and the marketing focuses on the solution from a business perspective.   NetApp is starting to do the same with their recently announced FlexPod.  The main downside to these new initiatives is that they seem to forget about the SMB.  I think it’s great from a techie POV that a FlexPod can handle 50,000 VDI sessions.  But as an IT Architect for my organization, so what?  We only have 4200 employees or so.

Right now, I’m sort of in-between in what type of information I need: technical vs business.  I am technical at heart, but have been looking at things from a business perspective the last few yrs.  I am in the process of trying to map what our mgmt team wants to accomplish over the next few years to the storage feature sets out there in the market.  This is where both types come together.  Now if I can just get past the FUD.