More and more cloud-based resources are hitting the enterprise IT market, and with them come their marketing campaigns, rich with tacky new buzzwords. As someone who used to market cloud-based tech for a living, I used to be part of the hivemind that spit out these types of buzzwords.
I’m not proud; we latched on to “serverless” in my day, and it’s an ideal example of the oxymoronic nature of IT industry buzzwords. I mean, nothing is serverless; everything runs on someone’s hardware somewhere. But, in an effort to get the software to sell, anything that catches someone’s eye is going to be thrown out there.
“Storageless”: Oxymoronic, or Just Plain Moronic?
The newest square on the enterprise IT buzzword bingo sheet, however? Storageless.
It’s a term being pioneered largely by NetApp and Hammerspace to describe their newest industry offerings. We actually cover both NetApp and Hammerspace quite extensively over at TechFieldDay.com, and while I do think their products offer a lot of merit to the industry, I’m not a fan of their use of “storageless” in describing their stack.
Storageless Shan’t Be Thy Name
Chin-Fah Heoh, the always-entertaining curator of the StorageGaga blog, agrees. I’ve admired his scathing wit in the past, and his post about the newest jargon to come out of the enterprise IT marketing machine hits no differently.
Here’s a taste of what he has to say about the term “storageless”:
It is obvious that the storageless jargon wants to ride on the hype of serverless computing, an abstraction method of computing resources where the allocation and the consumption of resources are defined by pieces of programmatic code of the running application. The “calling” of the underlying resources are based on the application’s code, and thus, rendering the computing resources invisible, insignificant and not sexy.
I couldn’t agree more. You can read the rest of what he has to say in Storageless shan’t be thy name at StorageGaga.com.
