The Perils of Complacency with Enterprise Storage Systems

We live in an amazing time. In many ways, technology has changed our lives in ways that were unimaginable a few decades ago. Of course, this has also made our lives more complex, but we leverage technology to shield us from that complexity.

Take communications for example. Until the 1980’s, most communication was via telephone or perhaps email. Today there are many more choices – text messages, chat applications, web conferencing, and much more. I struggle to see how we got things done the old way. But the flip side is that all this connectivity has shredded the border between business and personal life. Still, I doubt that many of us would choose to turn back the clock if we could.

The Road Ahead

If you follow technology (and even if you don’t), you know one of the “next big things” on the horizon is the self-driving car. People have various attitudes about this concept, but the one I hear most frequently is that we are very reluctant to cede control of our safety to a machine. Indeed, most people would want the ability to take over control of the vehicle in an emergency. But the big problem with that approach is complacency.

If you are traveling along in a self-driving car that operates flawlessly 99.99% of the time, it is unlikely that you will be ready to react quickly if a true emergency sprang up. The only way you would be prepared for anything is if the car warned you about any exceptions to the norm before the emergency arose.

For example, if the car noticed a group of kids playing ball along the road, it should warn you that you might face a child darting unexpectedly into traffic so you could be ready for that.

Modern Enterprise Storage

Early in my career as an Enterprise Storage Performance analyst, problems were more the rule than the exception. We saw hotspots, imbalances, bottlenecks, hardware limitations and much more all the time. The storage vendors recognized the challenges and implemented technology that overcame these issues.

Wide striping, flash storage, auto-tiering, faster interfaces and many more capable hardware are just some of the innovations that have sharply reduced the frequency of storage related problems. However, if we allow our storage infrastructure to be strictly “self-driving” we do so at our peril. Instead, what you really need is proactive warnings when things begin to go out of bounds. In this instance, complacency could be very dangerous.

Avoid the Enterprise Storage Complacency Trap

I run into customers all the time that claim “they never have storage issues” because they purchased all flash or 16 Gb connectivity or huge cache or some other piece of technology.

While new technology mitigates a lot of issues, expecting that there won’t ever be problems is just short sighted. In fact, because the incidence of problems may be low, it is likely that they will be ignored until it is too late and some sort of business impact happens. Like the self-driving car example, you want to be alerted to risky situations early so you can be proactive and avoid negative consequences.

IntelliMagic Vision is the ideal solution for keeping modern Enterprise Storage healthy. Because it is infrastructure aware, it understands the capability of your hardware and won’t alert you to things that are not risky for your actual configuration.

Many thresholds are dynamic and based on a combination of workload and hardware attributes. Thus, the incidence of “false positives” tends to be very low. In the near future, IntelliMagic Vision will be further enhanced with statistical analysis to help detect subtle changes in workloads and applications over time.

If you want to keep control of your Enterprise Storage and avoid the complacency trap, take a look at IntelliMagic Vision. It will help you stay on the road to success!