Storage Revolution

Welcome to the Revolution

Storage management has become a mission-critical concern for organizations. The proliferation of data, the emergence of a legal and regulatory regime imposing long term data retention and security requirements, and the introduction of more and more "stovepipe solutions" by an industry more concerned with its bottom line profitability than with the consumer's budgetary realities and strategic needs have come together to make storage technology the largest single line item on the IT hardware budget.

Driving cost out of storage is not a function of cheaper hardware technology. A "SAN" won't do it, nor will "multi-tiered architecture" or "virtualization" or any other hardware panacea.

Storage cost containment is realized only by improving the management of data itself -- how it is provisioned with resources and protected by services. We need management that crosses the proprietary barriers erected by vendors in their wares. Management that is application-facing , and that forms a homeostatic relationship between application data and the services it requires from infrastructure. Management that makes fewer administrators more productive.

Management is required for efficiently provisioning resources and protection services to data . It is a prerequisite if companies are to build infrastructure that meets application requirements, rather than wasting precious resources on "one-size-fits-most" solutions from vendors -- solutions that don't meet anyone's application requirements very well.
Management is required for compliance : to ensure that data is properly stored and protected throughout its useful life or required retention period.
Management is required to derive any sort of business value from storage investments -- first, to purpose-build infrastructure in an intelligent way, applying the right resources to the requirements of data itself, and second to ensure that data is available when it is needed to support business decision-making.
Management is required to constrain staffing levels and labor costs. Only through effective management can you avoid needing to hire additional staff every time you deploy a new storage solution.

It shouldn't take a revolution to get effective application-facing management of storage. But, it appears now that it just might.

Without end users dictating the management requirements for storage, a truly universal and homeostatic management capability is unlikely to appear in the market. The industry can't deliver one. Hardware vendors use management to advance proprietary objectives, while ISVs must go hat-in-hand to the hardware vendors to beg for access to proprietary APIs or other hooks into hardware and processes. Industry associations have failed to deliver the solution through "co-opetition" schemes that only work for as long as the market encourages cooperative efforts. That isn't the case today.

So, welcome to the revolution. Maybe an open source initiative that focuses on end users can do what the industry cannot: create a meaningful mechanism for storage management. All that we need is you.

Join Up Now!

StorageRevolution.com is open to anyone who can contribute to the cause of developing effective platform-agnostic software for storage management .

First and foremost, we need end users to share their needs and requirements. Based on this input, a requirements specification will be developed to guide the overall effort.
Next, based on our experience with other Open Source efforts, we will begin with the development of a core framework. Let us know if you want to be part of the Framework Development Team or have code to contribute.
Then, we will need software developers skilled in writing managed code (C# and .NET) to be part of the teams that develop functional modules. (Later iterations of the framework and module software will leverage other managed coding regimes, but experience suggests that C# and .NET are an effective means to fast track our development efforts.)
Along the way, we need folks to review the work that is being done and to contribute their insights and ideas. If you are interested in this role, please let us know.

Both users and vendors are welcome. Our objective is to create a framework that is vendor-agnostic, but that affords the vendor community every opportunity to "plug in" their software and hardware products. That way, consumers can leverage the value of both commercial products and an open management framework to enable flexible solutions to their storage management requirements.

That's the plan in a nutshell. So, if you want to be a part of the effort, sign up today. No hassle, no cost, just a simple registration process that verifies your commitment to making this effort a success.

A Universal Framework

Design work is underway The goal of StorageRevolution.com is deceptively simple. We want to create a strategic storage management framework and related functional modules that will be completely open and will benefit storage consumers in a number of practical ways.

The framework itself must be easily deployed. It must enable the plug-and-play integration of functional modules that provide the means to accomplish the tasks of data management, which we define as application-facing storage management. That's a complicated way of saying that we want to manage storage on the basis of supply and demand, with demand characterized by the requirements of applications, and supply characterized by an unfettered understanding of available storage resources and services.

Functional modules that can plug into this framework may include both commercial software and special function modules created as part of this open source initiative.

Such a framework will facilitate the automation of data management tasks. At its core, the framework will provide information about application data and their storage resource and service requirements. And, it will provide visibility into all storage platforms from a performance, capacity, protective capability and cost basis, despite the barriers erected by some hardware vendors to obfuscate the measurement of their product's performance or its capacity allocation details.