Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/05/01/storage_fud_worst_fud_of_all/

Hey, marketing drone, what's with the FUD - nothing GOOD to say about your own kit?

'Tape is dead', 'SSDs rock', 'SSDs suck' - shove the lot of it

By Martin Glassborow

Posted in On-Prem, 1st May 2014 09:31 GMT

Storagebod Are we drifting into another round of the storage wars where FUD starts to fly? It always makes for good copy. The little guy complaining about the big guy, who in turn is complaining about the little guy: David with his sling versus Goliath with his rocket launcher.

The thing with FUD is that it doesn’t really work unless there is the tiniest grain of truth in there somewhere – you take the smallest and most inconsequential thing and magnify it. And in storage, it is really easy to do that.

Storage workloads can be very different and have very different characteristics. A great majority of my workloads are very different to most people's. And I find myself taking exception to almost every marketing message out there from all vendors.

“Tape is dead?” - Not in my workloads. Tape is really the only current economical media for long term digital archives.

“Disk is cheaper than tape.” - Only if you can get significant dedupe and compression.

“SSD is better than disk.” - When throughput is king, disk and SSD end up about the same.

“SSD same price as disk.” - Only if you can get significant dedupe and compression.

”Scale-up versus scale-out” - I happen to think that scale-out is the best architecture because it suits my applications. If you have a large legacy estate, you might find that scale-up works better for you.

There are so many factors to account for in the different workloads, from application design to the nature of the data. Storage doesn’t really distil down into a nice simple marketing message but it doesn’t stop vendors' marketing departments from trying – and hence we get mired in FUD.

Speaking of FUD: it’s sometimes Funny; it’s mostly Useless; and it’s written by Drones.

And we’ll get more of it this year than we have had for a few years, I think. ®