XIV lands quietly on planet IBM

storage for the lazy

I love these kind of announcements. They all give the impression that you're buying an infinitely sized bit-bucket. Just toss your data in and walk away: it'll be stored, managed, backed-up, snapshotted, mirrored and replicated. You don't have to think about anything - just write the cheque and tell the nice delivery man where you want it delivered.

Sadly, it never works like that. A disk is a disk, is a disk. They're still just spinning platters: you can only access each one so many times in a second. Need faster access? simple, just slap in more cache and watch as the law of diminishing returns dips into your wallet for increasingly large expenditure for increasingly minor gains.

Decide you want to reorganise the whole mess, after months or years of unplanned operations? Too bad. The time it will take to back up the array (and possibly restore it if things go bad) is longer than your maximum permitted downtime: usually a weekend. Of course, you can always buy another one and learn from your mistakes.

Ultimately, there's no substitute for knowing your applications. For getting reliaible forecasts of business growth. For having talented staff who appreciate the shortcomings and can exploit the benefits. However, since most companies don't have these things, they get into a situation where lack of money spent on attracting, retaining and training good people is spent many times over buying in the promise of technology to fix the problem for them.