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The idea of EATDISC first appeared in an October 2001 Enterprise Systems magazine column, written by the author. -
These market revenue estimates are mean numbers derived from numerous industry analyst market estimates ”each of which, by itself, strikes the author as suspect for a wide range of reasons. -
Based on the author's research, reported in various trade press publications , U.S. government agencies and departments largely rely on integrators and resellers to define their strategic goals. While less prevalent in the private sector, the outsourcing of "strategic planning" to "trusted solution providers" appears to be a growing trend in the commercial sector, as well as organizations cutting their IT staff and management in response to the negative economic conditions prevailing at the time of this writing. -
Using the terms Fibre Channel and SAN in connection is commonplace in the industry, though oxymoronical in technical terms. Fibre Channel is a serial storage interconnect that can be deployed in a switched fabric topology. It is not, however, a network protocol and cannot be used to create a network ”only a fabric of point-to-point connections switched at high speed. Readers should be aware of this very important difference, which will be discussed in greater detail later in this book. -
The name of the quoted party is being withheld at his request, though the author cited the speaker in a trade press article published in 1998. Since making the statement, the speaker's company has engaged in a strategic business relationship with the very hardware array manufacturer that was cited in the statement. The speaker asked to have his name removed from the quote (despite the fact that it is one of the more intelligent things anyone ever said about impediments to SANs in the industry) because, in the present business nexus, it was a "career limiting quotation." -
EMC also joined SNIA, but has been accused from time to time of being an "undependable advocate" of SNIA initiatives ” especially when they were at cross-purposes to EMC's own interests. The same criticism can be leveled at virtually every one of SNIA's members at one time or another. -
Taking the pledge is a description derived from various self-help groups popular around the time of the SNW announcement of CIM support. Developed by the author in a humorous column for Enterprise Systems magazine written shortly after the press event, it suggests that vendors approached the podium one after another, admitted that they had only supported proprietary management schemes up to that point, and pledged to support an open standards-based approach, CIM, going forward. As in most self-help programs, some "backsliding" ”that is, deviation from the pledged path or course of action ”is to be expected. -
In fact, CIM advocates, such as Mark Carlson, a network storage engineer for Sun Microsystems who also oversees CIM development at SNIA, would argue that CIM is not a one-size-fits-all management method. Each device can have a unique Managed Object Format (MOF) that describes the customized features and functions unique to that device. Still, the industry resists the notion that any universal management method, including CIM, could ever capture the "secret sauce" diversity in 17,000-plus competing storage products. Conceding that it could might create the impression in consumer minds that no important differentiators existed between products bearing different brand names . -
As per the previous note, Fibre Channel was not designed to serve as the plumbing of a SAN. It lacked, as documented in a Road Map whitepaper written by this author on behalf of the Fibre Channel Industry Association in 2001, "fabric services" for in- band device discovery, management, security, etc. that a real network protocol would have provided. BlueFin, if nothing else, adds an important fabric service that should have been provided in any real SAN plumbing solution from the outset. |
