Managing Block Storage At Scale: Introducing EMC ProSphere

Personally, I think the whole topic of storage management doesn't enough industry attention.  Far more ink seems to get spilled on more prosaic topics like debating storage network protocols.

By all rights, storage management ought to be a topic of vibrant discussion and debate.

There's so much is in play here:

• dramatically growing information volumes and associated storage farms
• new storage technologies, like flash and storage federation
• the growing predominance of virtualized workloads
• the rapid shift to IT-as-a-service models (e.g. "cloud")
• and, as ever, the need for efficiency, control and choice

I think we collectively spend too much time debating the technologies themselves, and perhaps far too little time discussing how people might use them effectively.

So it seems almost precognitive that today EMC is launching an entirely new storage management environment targeted at large scale environments with demanding block-oriented storage workloads.