A Storage Letter to SANta

Dear SANta,

How has your year been up at the North Pole? A bit warmer than normal? Have you had lots of visitors coming up to see the melting ice? Has the whited-out landscape given way to green grass or blue water?

Okay, lets cut to the chase, as I know you are busy and I have plenty of year-end things to attend to as well. What I want for Christmas this year:

Capacity planning tools that look at physical and virtual servers, storage, networks, and facilities, including power consumption. These should include the ability to show performance activity information plus space utilization. Oh, if you can throw in some availability reporting and measurement modules, as well as a template to comply with the future EPA Energy Star for servers, storage, and data center initiatives, that would be great.

Access to your new SANta Shopping as a Service (SSaaS) Website. I understand it will offer managed services including backup, archive and replication with all data being kept in a cool, climate controlled facility. Will you be using this site and data to determine who has been naughty and nice? Being how you are up north, are you using Asigra software from Toronto, or is its software too hot for your use?A new de-dupe decoder ring to determine distinguishing features during discussions and debates with Dr. DeDupe. Can you also get me a new 2008 storage industry poster for my wall that shows who does what, who's the greenest of them all, who OEMs and resells to whom, and who my account reps will be for what companies selling me storage and backup for server virtualization solutions this year?

Help with my operations as my primary storage operator and pilot “Auto” moved on to a new position. So I need some storage automation tools, preferably something that works with what I have already and that I don’t have to hire more people to support or that's so expensive that I have to go to the equity markets to fund its acquisitions. If it simplifies things, SMIS would be nice, however not a requirement for this year.

Some extra green cash to pay my green vendors for the extra cache. I'll need it to make those 1-TByte SATA disk drives actually respond to some decent level of performance, now that I consolidated all of my virtual servers onto them. Oh, and can you do something about these vendors who seem to be to focused on suing each other as a revenue stream vs. selling their products?

RFID-equipped tape labels and GPS-equipped transport cases, along with the browser plug-in module for my 3G phone. That way, I can track my lost tapes and removable hard-disk drives on Christmas Eve while watching you on Flightaware. What a great stocking stuffer!

A self-shredding, self-healing, fully redundant and scalable, recyclable (green of course) round CAN to store all of those SAN, LAN, WAN, MAN, and FAN materials that I don’t need any more.Some iSCSI storage to back up my NAS. Seriously, dude, can you help me out?

Oh, and for home: An IOsafe RAID array that's fireproof and waterproof to attach to my HD-DVR so I can store more episodes of Hogan's Heroes, among others, while I’m busy tending to storage tasks.

Speaking of entertainment, I also want to get a jump on Halloween for next year, so bring me a DCX Man costume or at least a video of DCX Man and the DeDupe Diva.

Also for home, bring me a self-provisioning (thin, preferably) policy-based automated storage system that can also de-dupe and permanently safely discard the cluster and grid of dog doodoo onto some removable medium, preferably not tape, no encryption needed.

That’s all I want for Christmas, at least for now. Have a safe and happy holiday season and if you come across something else that should be on my holiday wish list, send me a note to let me know about it.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below..