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Oct
27
2015
Storage Portfolio Vendors want you to believe Silos are good
I have been meaning to write this article for a while, but a recent post from an employee at a storage portfolio vendor describing why organizations ought to desire to operate their IT infrastructure using siloed storage platforms made me deeply think about organizations’ realities, challenges and the requirements to deliver applications and services in todays’ competitive realities.
It’s no difficult to understand that diverse application types have different storage requirements around capacity, performance, uptime and resiliency. Traditionally the IT industry have dealt with these disparities using technologies and platforms created specifically to handle different types of workloads. Over the years the industry created specific storage platforms for low latency applications, storage platforms for high throughput, platform for high IOPs, deep and cheap storage platforms, object storage platforms etc. This list goes on and on… and sometimes even getting into industry specific; such as saying that the Banking vertical should use a certain type of storage or that Media/Entertainment industry should use a different storage solution for storing media files – even industry mantras have been created; completely ignoring the reasons behind these choices. It is not hard to understand the complexity and costs associated to managing a multitude of storage platforms along with the operational burden to maintain these environments.
There are inherent complexities when adopting a siloed approach, all the way from ordering, deploying and managing the infrastructure to the way how organizations have to budget for 3 to 5 years in advance and predict what their needs will be – as most IT teams know well, this is almost impossible nowadays. These silos are often detrimental to change and progress. Every new business initiative require buy offs from different teams within the datacenter. When it is time for upgrade, they are expensive and complex often times resulting in several hours or days of downtime. While this was acceptable a decade ago, business can no longer withstand such inefficiencies.
The industry is changing fast and while sellers will always be sellers, there is a new breed of companies solving this problem in a much more effective way.
Technology has evolved and better operational models are available – enter hyper-convergence. While legacy storage vendors may continue to say that they also have hyper-converged offerings, they are categorically portfolio companies that will try to sell you anything; in some cases, moving from platform to platform until they are able to fit the budget or business requirement. ABC too expensive? Try NYZ. No? We also have XEP.
Nutanix has no intent to sell anything other than hyper-convergence on-premises, off-premises, hybrid – but only hyper-co