Vendors look to flash as big ticket storage slumps in EMEA

Another article full of pointless buzzwords. In particular, the old (and it is now old, and tired) "software defined" bullcrap. It's storage software. Why does it have to be "software defined"? Is my gaming PC a "software defined" console? No, it isn't. It's a piece of hardware, of my choosing, on which I run software. It's just arsehole-defined marketing.

As for the actual news story, a lot of people have realised that workloads which previously required top-end systems can now be run perfectly adequately on mid-range systems. And those which demanded the performance levels that only the cache- and spindle- heavy monoliths could previously provide can now run on a few TB of flash.

If the price of the big boxes came down, a lot of people would suddenly find them attractive again. The reason they don't come down is because a lot of people still don't have the choice. Certainly there are fewer who require this sort of system as previously but the vendors still need to make their money and can still charge this amount to those who are still willing to pay. Besides, a lot of what you're paying is for the reliability and the support contracts. Oh yeah, and FICON support.

At the other end of the scale, people who would previously buy a small SAN-attached box are finding that cloud storage or some storage software running on generic kit will do the job at a fraction of the price. In the latter case, you're sacrificing the rigorous compatibility testing that the dedicated kit vendors do, but at that price point you can probably live with that.

None of this is new and it's happened in countless industries, not just IT. Road haulage decimated rail freight in the post-war years but if you need to shift a few thousand tonnes of coal to a power station, you're not going to stick it on the roads if you can help it. Ditto if you need to send a package across the Atlantic to arrive the next day you're not going to put it on a boat.