Real Innovation

Posted on 05. Nov, 2008 by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage

All the blog talk about whether or not EMC is innovative, and indeed whether any of the major news in the industry is truly innovative, got me thinking about real innovation. What are the true turning points in enterprise storage? What are the most influential hardware and software products? And which amazing products never really made the impact that they should have?

So I’m doing what any good obsessive-compulsive would do – making a list!

Over the next few weeks, I plan to post a few “top ten in storage” lists. Here are the topics I’m focusing on right now:

Most Important Storage Technologies – True technological and conceptual innovations like RAID, external storage, NAS, snapshots, and indeed the hard disk drive itself!
Most Innovative Storage Hardware Products – Which pieces of storage gear shook and shaped our world? How about EMC’s Symmetrix, DG’s CLARiiON, IBM’s RAMAC storage, DLT tape, the Auspex array, NetApp’s Filers, and Seagate’s ST-506?
Most Innovative Storage Software Products – What made the biggest impact on the software side? I’d name NetWare, LAN Manager, Legato NetWorker, Microsoft’s iSCSI initiator, VMFS, and PowerPath.
Coolest Storage Flops – All of this got me thinking about the things that should have been, like 3COM’s 3Server, WinFS, Storage Tank and IceCube, and Revivio’s CDP.

I’d like you to participate! Please use the comment section below to nominate your favorites in these categories. Or if you’d like to help out more, drop me an email. I’d even be willing to make you a co-author so you can help me put together the lists directly!

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Tags: innovation, technology, top ten

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CalvinZ

Stephen,

Of course I'm a biased vendor but I don't think you can talk about disk array innovation without including the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA). The virtualization in the EVA makes it far easier to manage than any traditional array on the market. If your not familiar with it, here is a white paper that talks about EVA virtualization:
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA1-81....

Cheers

stevetodd

Stephen,

I've always that that EMC Centera is one of the most innovative products I've ever worked on. It is the first truly object-based storage system with cool features such as metadata association, retention, authenticity, RAIN, shredding, etc.

Steve

http://technorati.com/people/t

I nominate the Kilner jar as the most innovative storage hardware product I've come across. Its containerised storage capabilities allowed for deep archival of summer fruits to be enjoyed in the winter months.

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Real Innovation

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