What is to be Done?

What is needed to correct this situation ”and to harness the tremendous engine of the free market to help solve practical storage problems ”is an informed storage consumer. More specifically ,

• To understand and properly assess the business value of technology, the storage consumer needs education.

• To give his or her recommendations about storage architecture and acquisitions credibility and sway with nontechnical business managers, the storage consumer needs status.

• And, to shape technology innovations within the industry so that they favor a more interoperable and robust storage infrastructure model, the storage consumer needs numbers .

How these requirements will be met remains to be seen. One approach is to form a storage user group that can branch out into many chapters across the United States and around the world. The only impediment to such a strategy is the time and effort required on the part of participant members : Storage managers are notorious for having unpredictable schedules and very little time for activities outside of work.

An alternative is to create an on-line community or institute that will facilitate consumers with convenient access to their peers, to trustworthy platform test data, to skills training, professional development and certification programs, and to reference standards on technology and best practices that have been derived from, and proven to work in, the trenches of actual IT shops . There, storage practitioners can realize that they are part of a larger group of Data Managers and can develop a professional identity and discipline that will earn them respect and recognition among their peers, within IT, and among business management.

A second goal of such a group is to enable the formation of a powerful, collective, and consumer-oriented voice within the storage field. With such a collective voice, storage consumers can demand the kinds of storage technologies that deliver real and measurable business value. And the industry will have no alternative but to listen.

The Data Management Institute, which I have recently founded, is intended to provide just such a community for storage practitioners and consumers. By the time that this book is published, the Institute should have a full suite of training and certification programs and should be well along its path toward collecting and disseminating vendor- agnostic , actionable information for storage technology consumers. Visit the Data Management Institute at www.datainstitute.org for more information.

I thank you for reading this book and hope you will join us in the next evolution: the Holy Grail of Data Management.