Don’t let me be misunderstood …

I talk to a lot of people who know a lot of stuff about servers. They sell them, build them, repair them, attach storage to them etc. So when we start talking about external storage in general and IPSAN in particular, why is it I get the feeling there is such a vacuum of specific knowledge out there?

ISCSI, IPSAN … it’s a foreign language to a lot of the IT industry … why?

I’ll spend one meeting talking to people who know more about the ISCSI protocol than I regard as healthy for the average human, then spend another talking to people who are brilliant at recommending server solutions to customers using big brand name equipment.

Why then, should it be, that the people in one meeting have absolutely no idea what the people in the other meeting are talking about?

Don’t get me wrong … I’m not saying that sales people should have a brilliant handle on the technicalities of their products (they are, after all, sales people), and I don’t think that the technical boffins in the backroom should be able to sell jack, but in every other sphere of computing there is a middle layer who understand the technology and can position it within a marketplace.

So why can’t we do it with IPSAN?

Application engineers are a dime a dozen in serverland, networking, disk storage, even to some degree fibre san, but they are not exactly easy to find in the IPSAN arena.

This technology has been around a long time. It’s mature, it works and is ready for the general masses. So what is stopping it. If I read another analyst report saying that IPSAN will grow by x next year (and will be the next big thing) I think I’ll puke … it’s been that way for years now and never seems to change. Why?

I believe it’s because we are lacking people who (a) understand the technology to a reasonable degree, (b) can explain it in laymans terms to the end user and (c) can dispel the fear and doubt that the fibre lads have been dispensing since the usurper came along and started to challenge their right to make obscene profits.

So here’s the challenge. Send me your storage scenarios. Let’s make some discussion about the pros and cons of IPSAN and see if we can find people out there who can explain its benefits and weaknesses to the general public in a language they can understand.

I know there is a gap in the IT knowledgebase in the area of IPSAN and ISCSI … let’s fill it in a bit.

Otherwise we’ll be reading those same reports again next year.