Wanna Be Like Google? Then Screw SANs

The start-up says that aside from contributing pain-in-the-neck complexity and pricey overhead to whatever it touches, pre-Internet SANs, or in this connection NAS, are dated, monolithic, slow, inelastic, undistributed, frazzled by virtualization and a bitch to manage. They're as well a habitual bottleneck and an impediment to private clouds.

Anyway, Google spent a decade building infrastructure that banished network storage. It used software to make the local storage in commodity x86 servers fast, scalable and bullet-proof. Yahoo followed suit, as did Facebook and in the long run Windows Azure. The cloud era had arrived. Local storage, with enterprise-worthy software on top, became vogue in large data centers again. Nutanix means to commoditize it.

The industry

It says "The industry, which makes a lot of money by continuing to propagate existing monolithic innovation, will be forced to adapt to these new realities or, like the old monolithic server vendors, perish."

Maureen O'Gara the most read innovation reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected research reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara