Chuck's Blog

Informationist Musings

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know my beliefs about how IT is starting to play an increased corporate-wide role in managing, protecting, optimizing and leveraging a corporation’s single most important asset: information.

I’m using the term “informationist” to reflect what IT is becoming; evolving beyond being a technologist, and towards understanding the corporate-wide issues regarding information management.

If you’ve missed the back story, I’d like to refer you here, here, and here – as a start.

This morning, I come across two articles that help paint the picture.

The first article can be found in Computerweekly, talking about a recent Accenture survey that states “middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to do their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong”.

How true, how true.  And there are other, more troubling, aspects of this discussion.

Next Generation Backup, Recovery and Repurposing

Some things in IT never change.

When I was a young pup in IT back in the 1980s, backup was a painful problem.  Fast forward 20+ years, and it’s still a problem.

But new technologies can fundamentally change a familiar landscape.  As an example, the introduction of VMware’s ESX server in 2001 fundamentally changed how we look at servers going forward – it’ll never be the same.

Today, I’m going to argue that 2007 will mark the beginning of a transition period for this whole topic, at the end of which we just won’t look at it the same way.

It’s not a single product or technology in this case; it’s a combination of things that – taken together – can fundamentally shift our whole thinking around this subject. 

So Where Is iSCSI These Days?

We’ve been talking about it in the storage business for at least five years, maybe more.

On the surface, it’s got almost everything going for it: good performance, cost-effective, leverages existing network investments, strategic roadmap to 10Gb, and so on. 

You’d think it’d be pervasive in large enterprise shops these days.  But it’s not.

It’s been on the list of industry predictions every year since 2004. 

This is the year of iSCSI.  No, wait, this is the year.  Really guys, it’s going to happen this year.  And so on.

But that hasn’t exactly happened – and it’s not for the reasons most people think. 

I think iSCSI serves as an interesting case example of how change really plays out in the IT industry, and that things may not be what they first appear.  There are lessons to be learned all around – not only for customers, but for IT vendors as well.