Repackaged chicken, storage and the cloud

The concept of the cloud arrived amid much hype, pledging to address the core problems of enterprise IT. For CIOs who managed to weather the credit crunch intact, the cloud has been seen as the then and there-generation platform of choice, by promising the scientifically impossible - to deliver more for less, a concept perfectly suited to CIOs with shrinking IT budgets and ever-growing demand from business.

The public cloud

The public cloud, for all that, was like as not too at once-generation for some of the enterprises, to cut a long story short the private cloud arrived as a hero to the rescue. Private cloud innovation does not sit in the public sphere, now rather is available internally, and appears to directly address the individual concerns of the collective CIO thought around the inefficiencies of traditional IT and exactly the inadequacies of the enterprise storage platform.

The cloud message is a powerful one, and IT is listening more intently than usual because of the increasing need to satisfy the beast at the gate - a demanding business and an nearly insatiable appetite for storage capability.

So how do storage vendors respond to this cloud phenomenon, in light of the needs of the CIO and a traditionally poor reputation for efficiency and meeting business requirements? Quite easily, as a matter of fact: they sell the cloud. A perfect match.

The reality is

The reality is, now, that repackaged expired chicken is on the whole expired chicken. Injecting it with saline, changing the date and freshening the packaging will not alter the fact that it is past its usable life and should be destroyed on the spur of the moment. Consuming expired poultry is a serious health hazard. The same applies to IT and business - using repackaged innovation can be hazardous to the health of the business.

In many respects, I believe the two offerings should be the same, since both are required to deliver the same benefits to the business. But, since traditional enterprise storage has not always been able to adapt sufficiently quickly to changes in business demand, a new class of storage based on the “cloud” and its requirements, has emerged to challenge the traditional offerings.

As much as cloud computing contains after a fashion the same building blocks as traditional computing, they are fundamentally different in design and capability, particularly on the storage front. In this particular area, demands are concentrated and accentuated on agility and the platform's ability to provide resources as and if need be in a secure, available, scalable and cost-effective manner. This must all happen with the necessary elasticity to move in sync with business peaks and troughs - in short, it is the new economic world order of u- and v-shaped recoveries.

In fact, the storage-specific cloud capabilities are actually where enterprise storage should have been all along, nevertheless since this is not the case, the visionaries have changed the game by creating new levels of expectations based on capabilities that matched features to business benefits. The storage cloud provider was born. Un-tethered from traditional convention and legacy, it was able to completely change the storage game, leaving the chickens on their terrestrial path of tradition during it tracked a celestial trajectory.