“Cloud” isn’t just a fancy term for a big datacenter, or even a multi-tenant one. Cloud is different, and it demands a different kind of storage.
Chris Evans takes up this point in context of today’s EMC World announcement of the Symmetrix VMAX 40K, a “monster of a storage array”.
For the last 10 years, the advent of Storage Area Networks (SANs) has created a storage-centric view of the world with storage at the centre and the “planets” — networking and servers — wrapped around it like some pre-Copernican view of the universe. Over time, SANs have evolved to be ever bigger, with some organisations deploying huge fibre channel fabrics. As we’ve seen today, EMC continues to perpetuate that view with the release of the VMAX 40K, a 4PB monster of a storage array in the best traditions of the central SAN-based model.
However the world has changed. Storage is no longer the centre of the IT universe, but merely a player within it, and just as it came as a shock to those in power in the 1500′s when Copernicus proposed the sun was at the centre of the universe, so it will happen with IT and storage — especially so for cloud environments.
