This week I
really struggled in writing a blog relevant to the storage industry and it was not
for a lack of information. I had extensive conversations with storage providers
about how enterprise storage is evolving, the growing importance of larger caches
in storage systems and how organizations can more safely introduce alternative technologies
into their environments. But with the hullabaloo going on about health care in
the
right now and its possible vote this weekend in the House, I found it difficult
to focus on data storage.
Regardless
of what you think about what role government should play in health care and the bill
that is before the House, let’s think about this from another perspective. How
many of us would welcome the level of regulation that the government is
proposing for health care for the data storage industry?
To
illustrate this, think about the situation professionals in the health care industry
find themselves in right now. They are preparing themselves for a health care
bill that allegedly changes how they do everything from how and when they can
see patients to what they can charge for services to what procedures and
medications they can prescribe.
Now suppose
Congress was trying to pass a similar bill to regulate the storage industry.
After all, the storage industry is probably no less screwed up than the
health care industry as it has its fair share of high prices, lack of standards and
price gouging. However, are we really ready to abandon this system while far from
perfect in favor of ObamaStorage that would regulate and control the storage industry?
Consider a
few of the things that they might have to legislate:
- Storage protocols. Anyone remotely close to the
storage industry knows there is a storage protocol for every day of the month:
AoE, CIFS, FC, FCoE, Infiniband, iSCSI, NFS, and SCSI just to name a few. Of
course, this does not even take into consideration the different versions of
each protocol and how each vendor implements the “standard” for each protocol.
So depending on who is in charge of drafting this legislation, they may
determine that there are way too many storage protocols and that only CIFS and Infiniband
should be allowed to carry on while the others should be phased out. - Number of disk storage
providers and models they carry. I am working on the current DCIG Midrange Array Buyers Guide
and there are over 70 models already on the list. However there are many other
models and vendors available for high end storage, entry level storage, archiving
and network attached storage. Again, on the surface that sounds like way too many and is too confusing to customers. So the legislation needs to include some provisions to force all of these
storage vendors to only produce storage arrays that fit into two or three buckets – bronze,
silver and gold. This would certainly simplify the choice but unfortunately only 2 or
3 providers would survive, selection would decrease and prices would only
increase while services and support would almost inevitably decline. - Backup and data
management software. Why is it that Symantec’s NetBackup Media Server software does not recognize
CommVault Simpana’s agents? Or why doesn’t CA ArcServe tightly integrate with
EMC NetWorker? That just seems wrong. So the answer is new
legislation to include some provisions that it does not matter whose backup
software agent or media server you are running,vendors have to adapt their software to work with every other providers backup software. - Determining who is too
big to fail.
Most recognize that HP, IBM and EMC are big companies and they already have
bureaucracies that look like the federal government so let’s just deem them too
big to fail and make them the default storage companies and force all of the others to follow whatever standards they have. While I know companies
like 3PAR, Compellent, NetApp, Nexsan and many others have unique solutions that solve specific problems,
they are not behemoths like the other three. So all data storage vendors other than these three are on their
own and don’t come crying to us when legislation passes that favors the three
that are too big to fail and bails them out when they do.
not trying to imply that the health care industry does not need reform and
rework – it does. But be careful what we wish for. Because if this bill does get
through Congress and ObamaCare does pass, there is no reason to believe that ObamaStorage
or some variation thereof is not somewhere down the road and if that happens, watch out. Because in this attempt to lower our costs and make our decisions easier, we may just end up with no choices at all.