Much as I hate to start with an apology for the lengthy gap since my last post, I must clearly do so. For once, it’s nothing to do with a shortage of any opinions and ideas on my part, but simply has to do with a dramatic uptick in the general busy-ness of the business–and that’s good for all of us. All that busy-ness means that I’ve been involved recently in a greater-than-normal-plethora of briefings, whether on the phone or face-to-face or at industry events.

This has meant a glut of input to my already limited and rapidly aging brain–apparently, my cranium is not possessed of an ‘automatically expanding LUN’ and I suffer from contention in the face of complexity, so I need to constantly come back to one question as I hear about the new ‘thing’: “Yes, but what does it do?“ It’s always the point at which the discussions become interesting. Some vendors just restate what their ‘thing’ is. Many others start to tell me why their thing is better than other vendors’ approaches to the same issue, yet others will drift into IT integration and operations. A few–one might expect this to be more, but it is not–are full of self-satisfaction because they remember to say the ‘magic’ word: applications. That is, indeed, progress and not to be sneezed at since at least it provides some context. And that, you might be thinking, is the point of this post: to remind us all to talk about applications. After all, that’s what storage really does … isn’t it?

Well, yes. And no. It’s a good step, to be sure, but it misses the ultimate point. Mentioning ‘applications generically or even how a particular storage ‘thing’ works with a specific application is good, but not sufficient. It’s an acknowledgment that you know there’s more to IT than storage (you may well laugh at this, but you don’t sit through all the briefings I do!). However, it misses the point that there’s more to applications than running them–there is what those applications actually do for an organization. The quick version of all this is that too many vendors only explain storage, storage’s links to IT operations, or even operational links to applications. Very, very few make the crucial link to what those applications actually mean for a business … in other words, answering the “Yes, but what does it do?” question with “This is what my storage does for your business.” It might be business agility, reduced risk, new products, or, yes, even saving money. I mention this to encourage more to think in this manner and to really think it through, not to make my briefings more interesting (although that would be nice), but simply to–inevitably–improve their own business results. A commercial ran many years ago with a tagline that was (if I recall correctly): “We don’t make the things you use; we make the things you use better”. Shorthand, yes, but also a simple reminder to think about and to frame the purpose of storage. How does it make an organizations business better?

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