A couple of articles that have come out in the last week or so got me to pondering the current state of IT Management mentality, and it is somewhat amusing, if you think it through. We’re risk-averse where all evidence indicates we don’t need to be, and we’re cutting edge, risk aware but not averse, where all evidence says we should be treading with caution. The curious thing to me is that all of this is happening at once, and we’re okay with it.

The first article that brought this to my attention was published on The Register about Enterprise Storage, and talks about an enterprise storage guy who is discussing how his organization will only use a few top- of-the-line storage vendors, and how up-and-coming solutions have almost no chance of getting in the door of his enterprise.

The second article comes compliments of Network Computing and discusses a failure of a cloud provider, and is another IT person talking about how their cloud-based provider failed them and failed to resolve their issues in a timely manner.

Am I the only one amused by these two articles, taken in tandem? I mean storage is commodity stuff these days. I’ve written before about the joys of RAID and the highly capable software add-ons available in tier two storage vendors. The industry has been around long enough that true differentiators for the vast majority of storage environments are service and support. These days the new features that high-end, tier one vendors offer are all aimed at the high end of the storage spectrum. Most enterprises don’t need flash drives for a long-term cache, for example.

The cloud? It is immature, ill-defined (as a market), poorly documented, and lacks standards. What vendor you choose, or even if you jump in at all, is of tremendous importance to the success of your IT endeavors and possibly to the success of your enterprise.

We’re at an odd point in the technological life-cycle where the hype factor for cloud is driving some to try things that when looked at through the prism of realistic capabilities, it just isn’t ready for, while the storage industry has long been one where enterprises are told they might lose critical data if they use anything but the most feature packed, expensive vendors…

But in the end you have the organization to look out for. Put the inexpensive disk in and give it a test run, right next to the cloud solution. Seriously. If you’re willing to test-drive cloud solutions, then you should be willing to test drive less expensive storage solutions too. If you’re not doing either, then at least you are consistent.

The one caveat I would offer in the storage space is to make sure the functionality that you do need is in your chosen tier-two vendor’s offerings. If you rely upon replication for DR, buying storage that doesn’t include replication is kind of self-defeating. But given the state of the storage market, I’ll speculate that most enterprises are well-served by the functionality in less expensive solutions.

And check performance of course. Put high-performance gear in where it is needed, and not where it isn’t. Some enterprises need the incremental speed boosts of higher-end storage arrays, but some don’t, and in some cases the lower-cost solution performs as well or better than the higher-end gear.

Now some of you will immediately jump to the conclusion that this could be generalized to include F5’s markets. I say no, because F5 has provided VM solutions for dev, test, and low-volume implementations and physical solutions for your other needs. Our other products are cutting-edge high-quality (like WOM and EDGE Gateway), or technically tier two storage (ARX and Data Manager). So I really am only talking about the storage market, where even the “secondary storage” arrays of top-line vendors are more expensive than the “primary storage” lines of other quality vendors.

For the cloud? Well, pick a vendor and try them out. Don’t go crazy and move your entire infrastructure, stay loosely coupled, determine what they can and can’t do, and like every other tool in your toolbox, use them for their strengths. Or find a new vendor if your experiences are like the ones in the Network Computing article.

In other words, become more risk-averse on the cutting edge technology, and less on the stuff that’s been around since the 80s.

Related Articles and Blogs

• Despite a Claim of five nines, a 48 hour outage blew the curve
• The Enterprise Storage Buyer: Why I Stick With the Big Guys
• Startup with all-star backers aims to disrupt the storage market (Start-up? I covered them more than three years ago…)
• Isilon Scale-out Storage Selected by NAVTEQ
• Cloud Computing Journal on Sys-Con