Remember the 70’s and 80’s, the Hindi movies had two popular themes. First theme - boy and girl romance, obstacles, histrionics, reconciliation and finally everyone lived happily forever (well mostly). Second theme -Family connected thro’ a tattoo, a family theme song or some such identity, separation, multiple story tracks and all converging to one track and finally family unification. The standard joke in our family while growing up was since we do not have a family brand identity (tattoo, a locket, a theme song), how will we ever recognize each other in case we were to get separated. Off late more movies are being made for the large Indian populace settled outside India. Consequently the key content is colorful village fairs, buffaloes, green fields, brightly decked belles, village nautanki, religion, religious harmony, East vs West cultural debate, Bhangra, Gidha, Dandiya etc. Why this cookie cutter (also called formula movies) approach to movie making? Pure business sense, for movie makers (most), - stay on the safe course, do what has worked with audience, combine it with a clever PR machinery and have cash registers ringing.

But as each passing decade has shown, audiences are smart enough to distinguish and differentiate and thereby force a change in trends and formulas. Thankfully there are enough movie makers who are quick to adapt to change in technology and trends and come out with something which appeals to the audience. Well as time passes by, the new trend also becomes “formula” and that’s how we have seen themes evolve over time.

Isn’t a technology also guided by similar trends?  I will limit my meandering thoughts to technology in storage industry.  Over a period of time, I feel storage industry is also going thro’ similar phase of “Doing more of the same”. Data growth is faster than budget - start tiering, automate data movement between tiers (within the same system though); Want data protection – create more copies of data; Want faster recovery – create more copies on primary disk storage etc. etc. I am not for a moment suggesting that these are wrong approaches, these were absolutely right at some point in time( and some of them are still relevant) The bigger point is that we need to take a fresh look at entire storage architecture owing to advancement in various  technologies related to storage.

Why and How First the why and then the how? Why majority of vendors are not taking or talking new approaches and how can one take a fresh look at storage.

Why - As in case of movies, it makes business sense for vendors to stick to “formula”. Innovation costs money and secondly it impacts the current revenue streams. Let me illustrate it thro’ an example, tiering within the system is more beneficial to the vendors as most of the storage software ( esp in higher end) is licensed for the total capacity. Therefore higher the capacity, higher the software (and maintenance) cost.   Another reason can be attributed to the human nature of sticking to convention rather than change or innovate. As an example let us take the advent of Flash Drives. Flash Drives have taken away the mechanical latency associated with traditional electro-mechanical drives. The question therefore is should these be treated as a faster drive in a storage system or should these be deployed more creatively and innovatively. 

How - The following are few thoughts which I have. While this is not a comprehensive guide to designing a storage architecture for an oragnisation, but could serve as a good foundation to start with:

·         Can your architecture allow introducing new vendors or will you be locked in with one vendor? This may force you to buy future expansion from the same vendor.

·         In case your setup requires business continuity and DR planning from storage perspective, ensure that you are able to do that on a heterogeneous storage. It is to ensure that you are able to deploy a smaller storage at DR site (than production). Another way to look at it is that you will be able to avoid vendor lock-in.

·         Always calculate your usable capacity vs total raw capacity bought.  You will be surprised (if not shocked) at how much of it is being wasted in creating local copies to meet vendor “best practices”.

·         There will be business requirements, which will require you to create copies of production data. Does your architecture provide you capability to do it outside the production platform on a low cost platform?

·         Few of the vendors today offer de-dupe products for production data. It may be a good idea to enable de-dupe so as to save expensive real estate on production storage being wasted.

·         Do a quick check of the storage software that your environment will need and ensure that it runs across various product families from the same vendor.

·         Make yourself aware of the way storage software and maintenance is licensed and priced

As mentioned this is not a comprehensive guide and will need to be updated based on the technological changes happening at a rapid pace in the industry.