For companies dealing with storage hardware vendors claiming to have a cloud solution, I recommend you change your RFIs and RFPs. Ask them how much it will cost
for a fully managed storage service that is fully redundant, highly scalable, designed for enterprise levels of reliability and availability; RAID protected; load balanced; with fully virtualized access through a single global namespace; with policy driven replication,
automated data integrity checking with self healing; with integrated user-based security access and quota support; full directory structure with infinite sub accounts, with a
full billing, reporting and chargeback system; with multiple modes of access; 365/24/7 monitoring; all server/volume management; all break fix maintenance; BC/DR capable; with all SW maintenance, updates, and enhancements; capacity monitored; tech refreshed; with full SE and development engineering support, with a global storage
footprint. And tell me what kind of answer you get back from that monolithic box vendor on your RFI/RFP. Tell me how they try and cloudwash their way around it.
The last thing that needs to be called out is the fact that some of Isilon’s software is hardwired to their nodes, limiting customer flexibility. Combine that with a user-hostile interface, and, in my opinion, you have a recipe for a product that is unfit for a cloud storage environment. In my opinion, deploying Isilon for cloud storage is analogous to buying a lump of coal versus purchasing services from your electric company.
My prediction is that true cloud storage and storage services will replace the old fashioned monolithic scale-out NAS products at an increasingly accelerated pace,
particularly for the content distribution/collaboration, unstructured data and archival requirements of companies worldwide.
