I recently appeared as a guest on an Infosmack weekly podcast. Greg Knieriemen hosted the cast, and joining me were fellow data storage authors Marc Farley and W. Curtis Preston. After the usual banter, we got down to the business of making some storage industry predictions. I (of course) took the opportunity to get on my Hybrid Disk Drive soapbox, proclaiming that this will happen within 5 years, and Curtis showed that he was passionate about the inevitability of self-encrypting disk drives (we had a gentlemen’s disagreement on that topic.) Marc mentioned that when he wrote his book about SAN’s, he predicted that the ethernet SAN would someday become a reality (he was right.)
When the topic turned to cloud storage, I think we all agreed that automation would be key. I made the comment that we humans are all fundamentally lazy and anytime we have a choice between man or machine to do mundane/difficult work we always opt for the machine. In the cloud, this means that policy-based storage provisioning and data protection will become paramount. Greg asked whether or not I thought this was the right direction to be going. I responded that we really had no choice, the sheer volume of data we will soon be asked to manage will simply be impossible for humans to manage, so we’ll be handing control over to machines, like it or not.
We covered many other topics, such as examples of great successes and failures in the history of the data storage industry, and I gave a sneak peek into my next planned book “Building the Virtual Mainframe.“ All and all I thoroughly enjoyed being part of this podcast (yes even the banter) and I hope to participate in more Infosmack’s in the future…
In the meantime, here is a complete list of all the books authored by the people on this podcast:
Building Storage Networks Marc Farley
Storage Networking Fundmentals Marc Farley
Evolution of the Storage Brain Larry Freeman
The Insider’s Guide to Data Deduplication Larry Freeman
Backup and Recovery W. Curtis Preston
Using SAN and NAS W. Curis Preston
Unix Backup and Recovery W. Curtis Preston
Enjoy,
Larry
