ILM may be a pretty important milestone on the journey to storage as a service-and there's no question effective ILM is still at least a few years away-but there's still further to go.
"I don't know if lifecycle management is the final story," says META Group's McIsaac. "It's certainly a more mature one than talking about the raw storage, but I don't know if it goes far enough to talk about storage as a pure service, managed by policy and expanded through virtualisation."
"Where I think we're actually heading, we're talking about the adaptive enterprise, on-demand, grid computing, that's where technology is taking us towards," says Selway. "It's the ability of organisations to rapidly change their infrastructure to meet the changing business requirements."
The long-term vision currently being pitched by the major IT players, particularly those with services arms, is for IT as a whole to become a service that can be virtualised and provisioned dynamically. Storage is a major part of this vision, but not as something to be viewed as separate from the rest of IT. "Why have storage as a separate discipline, why not just have it managed in the same way you manage your network infrastructure and your server infrastructure?" says Selway.
To offer storage as a service, when we finally get there, IT needs to present it in terms that make sense to the business, says McIsaac, "Hours of operation, mean time to failure, mean time to recovery, and cost... that's the hand-off between IT and the business: how much storage do you want, what quality do you want, and here's the price."
Sit back and relax
Storage today is an enormous hassle. If vendor visions are to be believed, storage in six or seven years' time will be a matter of putting your feet up and watching the blinking lights. The roadmap is in place, and the steps required to get there have been identified. Will it all work out? We'll just have to wait and see.
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