There are no hyperlinks in this posting, because it’s sensitive.  Some people might get a little touchy.  Or hurt.

I had the opportunity to meet this month with the head of storage planning and management at a large, global corporation.  Just in case I happened to meet with you this month and you are reading this, let me answer the question.  I meet with a lot of people, and no, I’m not writing about you. It is someone else.  I’ll call him Guy #1.

“So, if it isn’t me, how large is Guy #1’s company?,” you might ask.  Let me answer that in storage terms by saying that deploying 50 terabytes a month of new storage capacity is well within his stretch goal for the year.  See, I told you it wasn’t you.  You barely exceed 45 terabytes a month.  Guy #1 probably won’t even break a sweat getting to 50 terabytes a month.  

Admittedly he’s got the usual issues of unallocated storage, under-utilized storage, storage for which the use-case has suddenly been changed, thus impacting performance requirements, recovery times, and availability requirements.  He could probably move some data to lower-cost tiers, but who’s got time to create tiers, and his window for moving data around the data center barely gives him time to migrate data off of the really old storage systems.  And, of course, he’s got a bit of orphaned storage.  That’s what he gets when the server team decides to take an application server out of commission, but fails to notify the storage team, thus leaving the storage allocated to the now non-existent server.  I don’t suppose that the server team’s near-religious embrace of virtual servers will have much of an impact on that problem, now will it?  And, of course, head-count to manage all of Guy #1’s capacity has been trimmed to the point of near non-existence.  No. Really.  It’s just a coincidence.  I’m not talking about you. 

Now, what made this conversation even more interesting was the conversation I had the following week with one of Guy #1’s internal customers.  I’ll call him Guy #2. 

Guy #2 is an applications guy.  He’s got a bunch of applications, and the applications are integrated.  In fact, they are interwoven using an application-integration technique called “vermicelli.”  But, of course, applications run on servers and networks and storage.  So part of Guy #2’s job is to tell Guy #1 in the storage team, and his counterparts in servers and networking, what his requirements are, and Guy #1 has to do it.  Isn’t it nice when you can just tell people what to do, and they do it? After all, Guy #2 is the customer.

Guy #2’s big beef this week, was not, as you might think, all of the problems he was having integrating and rolling out all of the new applications and application upgrades planned for next year.  His big beef was, “Why does it take Guy #1 more than 6 weeks to give me 50 gigabytes of storage to test my new application, when I can go down the street and buy 500 gigabytes for a couple hundred dollars today?”  I didn’t help the matter much, when I informed him that Guy #1 was installing almost 50 terabytes a month, and there should be plenty of spare capacity, reminding myself once again that sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut.

For the record, Guy #2 thinks that the only way around this lack-of-responsiveness issue is to take his applications and run them at a hosting site.  In defense of Guy #1, he’s probably got a terabyte worth of policies and procedures, against which he is regularly audited, that absolutely prevent him from just allocating storage to anyone who asks.  Also, for the record, Guy #2 will probably be in violation of corporate policy, if he allows certain data to float off-site without following a different, but equally-hefty terabyte of policies and procedures regarding data availability, privacy, access control, recoverability, and off-site transmission of information.  Guy #2 probably doesn’t care as much about the terabyte of policies, because, after all, he’s got a business to run.  Guy #1 cares a lot more about the terabyte of policies, because, after all, he’s got a job to do.

So why am I telling you all of this?  The main point is that as you build your business plans for your next innovative product, keep in mind the business realities and operational realities of your customers.  And, if you are in the storage industry, while I’m a big fan of some of the next-generation virtualization capabilities, green storage, storage tiering, data migration tools, and de-duplication technology, what is really needed is a set of tools to deliver policy-compliant provisioning and management of storage.  Then maybe Guy #1 and Guy #2 can be friends.