Beyond RAID

Robin Harris is back on his soapbox claiming that the Google model is the future of storage. He ignores the fact that Gmail has lost people's email proving that it's just as susceptible to the usual admin headaches everyone else has no matter how whizzy you might think the underlying technology is, but I think crowning any storage paradigm as the successor to RAID is premature.

Yeah you would say that EMC boy I'm sure some of you are muttering, but I'm not too worried about the world ending because Google or Amazon or whoever has a big file system, lets ignore the fact that they had to hire rocket scientists to design, build, deploy and maintain it. Lets just learn lesson one, in chapter one, on page one of the Big Book of Admin

That's why we have so many of them. Be it for reasons technological, deployment/management, or cost. So what about the future of information infrastructure? Well in the future you don't worry about things like RAID, or where you data is, or where it needs to be moved to, or how it gets there. Something else does the worrying for you. EMC already has more than it's share of ideas about the future in active development, or being argued about at ear splitting volume by people with Ph.Ds inside the office of the CTO.

Though as usual chances are that the next big thing is being developed by people no one has even heard of. There's a good chance that it won't come from anybody we've seen already as someone else has the current players figured out and has/will have a counter punch waiting anytime one of them tries to plant their flag on the summit of the future. It doesn't matter if it's a big Internet company, a traditional vendor, or the open source folks, there's a competitor out there somewhere who's figured out how to knock their teeth out while dodging their next swing and they'll manage to do it too.

The lesson? No matter where you work or what you do if you don't believe that the smartest people are working somewhere else then you'll be roadkill when the next generation arrives and floors the accelerator. That goes for you, me, and everyone else.

Andy Grove was right. Only the paranoid survive.