Storage Intelligence Begins With Informed and Pragmatic Device Decisions

Of course, many additional factors beyond price and performance may enter into a decision about which type of disk or array to buy. Return on Investment analyses and anticipated service life will be factors in some cases, as will the manageability and "secret sauce" functionality that vendors add to their disk arrays through controller firmware. These are the subjects of subsequent chapters.

For now, it should be clear that the intelligence in a storage infrastructure is not an intrinsic quality of a particular topology or technology. From the standpoint of platform design, the intelligence in a storage repository is the direct result of proper analysis of application storage requirements and component characteristics.

Bottom line: The storage infrastructure is only as smart as you make it. There are no "angels in the architecture" without a few "devils in the details." It is the burden of the storage architect to evaluate options from the standpoint of business value and to select those that make the most sense.

It all begins with the data.