Abridged as my memory is not what it used to be
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
signifying nothing." — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)
As a recent transplant from BEA Systems (AKA Oracle), I was struck with the overriding fear that my opening keynotes from last year’s BEAworld’s (see above), where I suggested that the idiots Macbeth referred to were people who tried to deploy SOA (service orientated architecture) in scale without using a virtual infrastructure, was perhaps misrepresented. Sadly, I’m now of the opinion it was me for not realizing that to enable a truly dynamic or agile applications infrastructure you need dynamic/agile storage.
Fast rewind…
I was asked to keynote at BEAworld on the topic of Virtualization and SOA. I hate the opening moments where you step up on stage and awkwardly introduce yourself, so I had a cunning plan to recite the above soliloquy from Macbeth, and then assert that he was the first SOA architect pointing out that ‘situational applications’ wouldn’t be built and discarded but would stick around and have a life of their own, so it’s a smart thing to plan for the unplanned.
I fundamentally believe we’ve redefined what both an application is and what a developer does, with mash-up, compositions and situational applications. Every employee of a business can construct an application or service and create unforeseen computer load on a data centre - a growing phenomenon as the expedient execution of data to knowledge drives a competitive edge and there’s nobody better than the consumers to know what and how they need this delivered.
This does however create volatility in the applications infrastructure, and I’d assert that to be successful you’d better deploy in a virtualized environment to handle the peek workloads without over provisioning or limiting their potential.
So why do I now see myself as the idiot? Because I glossed over the storage aspects by waving a couple of glib acronyms (NAS or SAN), yet didn’t understand that the majority of alternatives would be like creating the world’s fastest boat, where the anchor’s always deployed.
Now don’t get me wrong, I started my professional career as a backup admin in Fleet Street London for a chartered accountants running up and down stairs with arms covered in reel tapes, so I’m no stranger to this world.
Guess what systems I started on?
However, it’s easy to be mono focused and to not take into account the holistic challenges which I fell prey to.
The last few months have been a cathartic experience. I’ve been immersed in NetApp’s data protection offerings and their platform innovations. What’s washed over me is the foresight of the architecture to handle the flexible workloads that the emerged application demands will place.
What excites me is not only how NetApp’s addressed storage flexibility inside the systems (Snapshots, FlexClones, thin provisioning and even hetero consistency groups for those pesky portal composite apps using WSRP), but what really gets me going What’s got me cycling is the ONTAP architecture. ONTAP is so flexible, and yet connected that you could potentially re-factor a primary to a secondary, a primary to a VTL, a Vault, a mirror and so on.
Why is this great? ROA (return on assets), I just love the tangibility of buying something for a specific purpose, yet having the faith that if I want to re-use it, it’s flexible enough to morph to my changing needs.
The subtle marriage of software and hardware yet abstracting to a flexible model allows your assets to be as dynamic as your requirements. I’m sure the adages, ‘do more with less’ and ‘evolutions win over revolutions’ resonate well to ROA.
At this point I’d refer to some obvious candidates as examples: your iPod or iPhone as its features morph and extend, and my personal favorite, the Sonos music systems. OMG, I can’t tell you how excited I get when a new software version is automatically downloaded!
http://www.sonos.com/
If you peruse the successful innovations in today’s technology consumer market, there’s clearly a bias towards data and hardware, somewhat abstracted, architected for change and forming a truly symbiotic relationship.
There’s for sure some road still to travel, but I can’t help but feel NetApp’s closer to the end than the start. Kostadis, my ever passionate and vocal associate, has called this a ‘fantastical journey’, but one I’m sure we’re all embarked on, and one that’s easier if we’re cognoscente of the needs and demands of all the passengers.
I’m very excited to be part of this emergence. I don’t believe there’s an alternative anywhere close to such comprehension of bridging the storage and applications divide and with what’s in the hopper it’s only going to get better.
So to this inaugural blog, I confess and therefore absolve myself of my blinkered optics and cast myself towards the shameless abandon of the new order 
