Thoughts Aweigh...

Been on vacation. Finally got the boat sorted out and took it to Nantucket. Wow.

Finally found out where everyone disappears to after they take their storage company public...

Stopped along the way in MV and took David parasailing. Wow.

Been spending a lot of time thinking about virtualization - again. Still think Kirby's Law applies - now having given it some thought beyond just storage. But...here's the thing. Its not really the virtualizing itself that means anything. Virtualization is decoupling. Seperating logical access from physical location. a proxy. whoopdeedamndoo. It's the services you can inject into, or maybe more respectfully to Kirby's Law...under, the decoupling layer that matter. Services can be simple - provisioning, federation, migration of the virtualized resource for instance. Or they can be more complex and presumably higher value - directed access, security, cleansing, etc. And given enough horsepower, you might even host applications in the virtualization layer - CDP/Backup, Indexing, etc.

All of this presumes however that you respect Kirby's Law and virtualize resources from the layer above. Decoupling a resource from itself makes no sense, and injecting cross-resource services into an individual resource itself makes no sense either. What does that mean pracitically? It means you will eventually learn to decouple physical storage from servers and decouple physical servers from the network using seperate, purpose built virtualization/service delivery platforms. And it means that the services aimed at managing those physical resources will eventually come to reside in the service delivery platform not the underlying physical resource layer.

I'm right - but it may take a while for the physical resource layer guys to admit it. They will have to find another way to make money before they do.

Now, if I can only figure out how to beat them to it, I think there is 150 foot slip waiting for me at the Nantucket Boat Basin....