Centralized storage; it’s a good thing!

Many companies have engineering teams working with data intensive applications that can’t get the performance they need via centralized storage architectures. In other words, they become disk I/O bound.

I spoke to a sharp systems manager the other day that supports the data storage for a large team. He knows first-hand how developers value performance, and finds they often squeeze performance by installing additional local drives in their workstations for fast storage. But this is hard to backup and manage centrally.

He also knows that right now he can’t provide the same level of performance from the centralized infrastructure – which is much easier and more cost-effective to manage and protect. So it is hard for him to force the development team to use centralized storage. In essence, he’d be asking them to sacrifice precious performance.

This is another interesting twist on storage performance, showing symptoms that ripple through organizations. The developer’s desk USED to be the best option for fast storage as centralized storage was too cumbersome. But large enterprises need storage solutions that effectively support data intensive development efforts AND provide IT and storage administrators with centralized management and protection.

About Reality Check

We added a new category today called Reality Check. The goal is to provide short snippets of wisdom from the real world. As I like to remind myself, you can learn more talking to an IT wiz for 5 minutes in person than you can from spending a week in the office researching on the Internet. Enjoy a slice of reality!