I have a saying, "simple always wins". Performance, scalability and reliability are all important considerations when making a storage decision, but if you can't figure out how to use all of those features then the fact that you may have them really doesn't do you much good. The recent EMC announcement was focused on increased performance, faster processors, faster drive technology with SSD, better power efficiency with spin down drives, etc... What I found lacking was how they were going to get their customers to take advantage of these new capabilities. It is important to consider that you just don't start copying data to a SSD and expect performance improvement. You have to copy the right data from the right systems, and not providing tools to help a customer through this is like putting a speed boat in a swimming pool... you can go no where really fast. 

Simple does not mean slow, unscalable or unreliable. It in fact increases each of them by making them accessible to mere mortal administrators. Simple actually requires greater sophistication from the manufacturer to make the complex able to be delivered in simple form. Simple is also not an insult to the administrator. As I have said before you are busy enough, you don't need to add difficult tasks to prove how smart you are, you need tools that are going to allow you to go home on-time for once. Remember dinner? 

Compare that to storage companies that do storage virtualization, such as Compellent. Every announcement I have seen from Compellent focuses on making life simpler for the user. Sure in each announcement there is improved performance, scalability and reliability but always the key theme is making it usable and solving customer problems, simply. A great example is Compellent's replication capability, a challenging task with most systems. Compellent's thin replication allows the management of the replication process to be simpler to deploy, requiring only a few mouse clicks. The management of thin replication is built to be extremely simple and seamless to deploy, (stated by current customers using it) and with a few mouse clicks it's completed. The need to create large scripting efforts to automate the replication process are not needed either, the replication is driven through simple and easy to create replication templates to further the ease of use in setup and installation.

This focus on simple enables other features like Data Progression that allows for tiered storage to actually become a reality by automatically moving older blocks of data from fibre to SATA drives. While Compellent has yet to make an announcement on green drives they do currently support SSD as an option, the capabilities delivered by Data Progression is the only way to broadly deploy these technologies. You have to understand how blocks are being accessed so you can position them on the drive technology that makes the most sense. If the manufacturer makes you do this, and do it manually, what value is that to you? I don't know many (any?) IT professionals that are looking for more things to do.

There in lies the real challenge for legacy storage systems manufacturers, they don't have an understanding of the data set beyond the volume, they don't really virtualize. Even their attempts at thin provisioning leave something to be desired (as we will detail in a future article). To leverage new technology and to continue to improve simplicity will require an understanding of that data at a much more granular level. 

Performance is easy, processors will continue to get more powerful, I/O bandwidth will continue to increase and drives will continue to get faster. What is hard is to have the ability to integrate all of that into one system, design it to can handle new technology we don't even know about and then, most importantly make it simple for the user to take advantage of all of these new technologies.