The other day a vendor came and told me he wanted to help me solve my storage problems:

Vendor: we want to help you solve any storage problem you have
Customer: how's that?
Vendor: because we have a solution approach, we can help you solve your problems
Customer: right, you bring solutions to my problems! so here's one of my problem: How can I honour storage requests coming from various groups
Vendor: easy, buy our SRM tool!

The term solution can be ambiguous, as it can either mean
1. the answer to a problem:
the answer to my storage provisioning problem would be a SRM tool
2. the process of solving a problem
the key word here is process: what "things" can I put in place in order to solve, on a long term basis, my particular problem

As a matter of fact, as a customer, I was after the 2nd definition of "solution", when this vendor offered me the 1st one.
What I was looking for, was a process to solve my provisioning problem. A good process survives any technology.

In other words, the answer to my problem is a building block, part of an IT architecture

Mister Vendor, listen to me, an IT Solution is either
* building block, which is part of a framework called: IT Architecture.
* Service defined as part of a service catalog

If you own the architecture, you own the building blocks and all the components that go into them. Otherwise, just sell the components that make my building block, but don't expect to be my trusted advisor.

For an introduction to IT Architecture check this out

Next blog, I will post a table of content of an Storage Architecture document. keep coming!

The time is coming

CIFS server for Opensolaris is now reality: first release is available here
anytime soon, it will be integrated into Solaris its self and : bye bye Netapp!
Company starts to undestands limits of Netapp, and this is a fact I am not allowed to prove
but we are near the time where, from a simple DVD, one will be able to install, on a commodity server (as well as a high end server) a fully functional NAS appliance, with all advanced features such as snapshots, ndmp backup, CIFS/NFS (without addditional cost), FC (as Lun provider), and even archiving features such as SAMFS

Parmigiano for my Spaghettis

I invited 2 colleagues of mine at a pasta restaurant called "Netapp" to try their speciality "Spaghettis" (see previous post). I has happily eating the superb pasta with my fork (no spoon!) and suddenly I felt I needed to add Parmigiano ... I asked the waiter to bring me some when he announced it would cost me...$47.000 to add "cheese from Parma" on those spaghettis !!

• Me: What?? you must be joking! $47k to use a stupid cheese??
• Waiter: Mi dispiace, parmigiano for 3 plates cost $47.000
• Me: no thanks, next time I need parmigiano, I'll choose another pasta restaurant..crook!

Frankly, do you think Netapp is really entitled to ask $47.000 to use NFS ??? is this fair when NFS has been around for as long as unix exist.

Basically I'll wait a couple of month to have more recent boxes doing NFS without additional licenses (may be fishworks or Nexantastor)


bon apetit!