This article is more than 1 year old

Golden age of invention or hyped-up age of overblown marketing?

Revolutionary and a massive step forward for the industry

Storagebod blog Barely a day passes without receiving an announcement from some vendor or another. Every one is "revolutionary" and a massive step forward for the industry – or so they keep telling me.

It would seem that we are living in a golden age of invention.

Yet many conversations with peer end users generally end up with us feeling rather confused about exactly what innovation is happening.

We see increasingly large number of vendors presenting to us an architecture that pretty much looks identical to the one we know and "love" from NetApp - again, at a price point that is not that dissimilar to what we are paying NetApp and kin.

All-flash arrays are pitched with monotonous regularity at the cost of disk based on dedupe and compression ratios that are often "best case" and seem to assume that you are running many thousands of VDI users.

The focus seems to be on VMware and virtualisation as a workload as opposed to the applications and the data. Please note that VMware is not a workload in the same way that Windows is not a workload.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s some good incremental stuff happening. I’ve seen a general improvement in code quality from some vendors after a really poor couple of years. There still needs to be work done in that area though.

But innovation? There’s not so much that we’re seeing from the traditional and new boys on the block. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like