In the last ten years storage media has evolved from hard disk drives (HDD) to SATA/SAS flash drives to NVMe Flash drives to Intel Optane Drives. How many storage systems have you had to deploy in that timeframe to keep up?
Over that same ten years we’ve seen storage protocols move from fibre channel to iSCSI to NVMe over Fabrics as well as the increasing popularity of SMB and NFS. How many storage systems have you had to deploy to keep up with protocol demands?
In addition to rapidly changing media types and storage protocols, you need to deal with ever expanding use cases. Your data center has to support high transaction databases, dense VM virtualized infrastructures, file shares, large unstructured data stores, analytics, big data and soon artificial intelligence workloads. How may storage systems have you deployed to support these use cases?
If the answer is, more than you can support, you are not alone. Most data centers have more than seven different storage systems from at least three storage manufacturers in their data centers. Each of these systems has different software that IT needs to learn, operate and support. It's no wonder that storage is so complex.
