We have all heard Albert Einstein’s quote “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Intuitively we know this is true, but it is amazing how often we ignore this advice.
There is no better example than the computer storage industry. For the past several decades, conventional wisdom was for IT professionals to support their data storage capacity needs by purchasing large, expensive, complex storage arrays from a handful of very profitable storage vendors. The purchase cycle was very long and complex. The vendor was making huge margins, so the process typically included vendor paid golf outings, expensive steak dinners and lots of meetings/negotiations. Once the purchase was made, the IT professional would be the proud owner of a complex storage array and would need dedicated resources to care for it tenderly for the next 3-5 years – at which point they would then start the process all over again.
The downside is that it was extremely expensive (CapEx investment), was hard to upgrade (impossible to downgrade), had to be shared by all of the departments within the organization, required a lot of maintenance – and in the end – rarely met the needs of the organization over time.
It is time to start thinking and acting differently. If the old model doesn’t work, why continue using it? With the advent of cloud-based architectures, there is a new way. Ben Woo, of the analyst firm Neuralytix, just published a new research brief entitled “It’s Time to Think and Act Differently” where he challenges IT Professionals to leverage cloud-based Storage as a Service (STaaS) rather than traditional monolithic arrays. He even takes it one step further and argues that moving to a Storage-as-a-Service model does not mean you have to give up any of your enterprise features. In fact, you should get a higher quality of service.
It is a good read- click here to view the report!
