Earlier in the year, I wrote a post, “Technology is rarely the issue“. In that post, I said:
As techos though, let’s be honest. The technology is rarely the issue. Or to be more accurate, if there’s an issue, technology is the tip of the iceberg – the visible tip. And using the iceberg analogy, you know I mean that technology is rarely going to be the majority of the issue.
Now it’s time for the follow-up.
In that article, I was effectively talking about specific situations – e.g., when someone says to you, “product X is crap; we’ve had it for Y months and it still doesn’t work properly”. While sometimes it will mean that product X is bad, it usually means that the wrong product was purchased, or there wasn’t enough training, or it’s being misused.
In this post, I want to turn from the specific, to the generic, and suggest that it is rarely going to be the case moving forward that technology is the solution. It will be part of the solution, but we are moving out of a situation where a single piece of technology is the entire solution to a problem. In fact I’d suggest that it was rarely the case anyway, but we must be more aware as technology continues to get more powerful – it’s not a magic bullet.
For this reason, the core emerging technology – that we must continue to demand from vendors, and continue to support the development of – is interoperability. This may come from open standards, or it may come from virtualisation, but it has to become core to all future technology.
Why?
We no longer have the luxury of mass swapping and changing of technology. Martin Glasborow, AKA Storagebod, wrote in “Migration is a way of life“:
One of the things which is daunting is the sheer amount of data that we are beginning to ingest and the fact that we are currently looking at a ‘grow forever’ archive; everything we ingest, we will keep forever.
Even though we are less than two years into the project, we are already thinking about the next refresh of technology. And what is really daunting is that with our data growth; once we start refreshing, I suspect that we will never stop.
Not only will we be storing petabytes of new content every year; we will be moving even more old content between technologies every year. We are already looking at moving many hundreds of terabytes into the full production system without impacting operations and with little to no downtime.
While Martin’s organisation is undoubtedly at the “big data” end of town, it reflects a growing problem for many organisations – the shrinking grace period. Previously we had scenarios where capital expenditure periods of say, 3 years worth of equipment purchase, would have short implementation periods, followed by long-term controlled and pre-allocated growth periods, followed by the final preparatory process leading into the next CapEx cycle.
This is increasingly becoming a luxury. As data growth continues, regardless of whether that data is hosted locally or externally, mass migration projects will become a thing of the past. It’s not possible to stop a business long enough to do a migration. They have to run seamlessly and synchronously in the background, transparent to users and the business, and the only way this will happen is via interoperability.
The two methods to achieve this are either compatible APIs/protocols, and virtualisation. In the cloud space for instance, whatever brick level storage is chosen, only a fool would deploy their business storage on just a single cloud provider. So you need two different providers, and you need to be able to interface with the same storage at both providers without every access step being an “If writing to Cloud X, this way, else that way.”
For locally accessible storage, virtualisation is critical – not just at the OS layer, but also at the storage layer. That way, it doesn’t matter whether you’re currently buying vendor X, Y or Z arrays and storage – and which ones are currently active. It should all be transparent to the business.
This is why technology is not the solution. Or rather, specific technology is not the solution. It’s the application of technology, and the interoperability of currently deployed technologies that will be the solution every time.
If you’re not thinking along these lines, you’re still staring into the past.