10.1 What Drives Change?

only for RuBoard - do not distribute or recompile

Change happens. Why?

It is a given that necessity is the mother of invention. Need drives change; but paradoxically, when we have achieved change, we suddenly determine that we have new needs. It may be that invention is the mother of necessity.

It wasn t that long ago that a telephone was a luxury in an American home. The photocopier (an invention turned down by some of the biggest corporations in the United States because it wasn t needed ) was a curiosity . To the list of past oddities and nice to have devices, add the fax machine, the microwave oven, the pocket calculator, and even the personal computer. Now these items are considered indispensable .

The SAN is beginning its journey from promising to indispensable. The SAN is the optimal solution to burgeoning mass storage needs, but once those needs are met, more demanding mass storage needs will emerge to drive SAN development.

Can we estimate the rate of change accurately? No. Futurists point out that it s a human trait to predict change conservatively. We look at change linearly, but it always takes place exponentially. Change can go even faster because of technology discontinuities or jumps ”the sudden appearance of radical new technologies.

Even as this book was developed, we read new announcements about LTO tape technology and articles about 2 GB Fibre Channel. And about the only prediction people have gotten right is the speed of microprocessors in PCs doubling about every 18 months. The 5.4 MHz 8088 you owned in 1984 is now a machine with a 733 MHz CPU.

Since the rate of technology changes cannot be predicted with any great accuracy, and are typically too conservative, we re prepared to predict aggressively, running the risk of hitting a little wide of the mark.

The useful applications derived from a new technology, and their social impacts, are rarely predicted with accuracy. In the 1950s, visionaries predicted personal flying machines in every garage, but didn t mention the personal computer. They missed on both counts. Even Tim Berners-Lee, the British programmer credited with inventing the World Wide Web, admits the WWW has turned out to be quite a different thing than the entity he envisioned .

Therefore, this chapter is based on beliefs, desires, and hopes as much as extrapolations of existing fact. We can tell you some of the trends, but the future implementations of SAN technology are dependent on how we all view technology and people.

We believe that people are essentially good, and will almost always do good. We also consider technology to be a good thing, an enabler for people to do better and get more out of life.

Will the SAN makes things better? It will make things happen, but who can say better? We d like to think so. Given that, let s launch into speculation about the future.

only for RuBoard - do not distribute or recompile