“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Abraham Lincoln

Over the last few days I flew to the Oshkosh fly in and camped with a few friends and enjoyed the air show and displays. www.airventure.com There were certainly a lot of interesting new designs in aircraft, engines and avionics. There are a lot of parallels in the aviation business and the enterprise storage business. There is always the ‘Fad’ factor of what is new and hot. And there are the old reliable designs that just keep on going. Aircraft engines have not really changed much in 50 years. And the Cessna 172 is a 50 year old design. The reasons why some things stay the same for so long is because you can’t change the rules of Nature in the air or in storage. A given wing area will only carry so much weight into the atmosphere, and that weight can either be fuel or people and baggage. Currently a given disk can only deliver as much data per second as the backbone of the network will allow to pass through from Point A to Point B.

Provided that you accept that you can make incremental improvements to your data storage design and that you want to maximize your return on investment the smartest thing you can do is improve your storage efficiency. Zerowait is working on a solution to provide a software solution that can help you improve you storage efficency. Jon Toigo’s blog mentions some salient points on why this is so important.

But the reality is that your storage vendor makes money on selling you inefficiency. Because the more storage you buy the more money they make. Our software will provide you with the information to help you create a more efficient storage network. It would make President Lincoln happy, because with our software, the storage vendors can’t fool you anymore!