Will SAN or NAS matter if your customer’s storage is in the Cloud?

An interesting question popped into my head yesterday. With all this push into the Cloud, the customer does not own most of the computer equipment. They are just getting services and when they want storage, do you think they care whether their storage is on a SAN or NAS?

I have mentioned this before, Cloud makes a lot of IT stuff irrelevant. Read my previous blog. This means that the demand for IT techies, sysadmins, consultant will suddenly be squeezed into who’s very good, good, not-so-good and the downright bad ones. Let’s the survival-of-the-fittest games begin!

Yes, the SAN and NAS, or even unified storage story doesn’t hold much weight anymore. However, to the cloud service provider, they will be out there looking for what is best for their bottom line, whether it will be a branded box or just a white box if they are willing to build the storage on their own. For those providers who have strong financials, obviously investing in premium brands like EMC, IBM, NetApp, and so on, makes sense because they need someone to blame and penalize when the shit hits the fan. For those who doesn’t have the financial prowess, this presents a whole new economy that resellers, partners, distributors can tap on to – build for these cloud providers at a cheaper price (hint, hint).

However, storage relies on a strong storage operating system to do just that. They are plenty of open source ones. Hey, you can practically build a simple iSCSI or NAS box with Linux. Consumer grade NAS such as NetGear, Synology and DLink have been using open-source Linux to penetrate the low-end, home storage market for years. The cloud providers will be a different ballgame, but the storage piece is fundamentally the same.

Things are changing folks, and for those consultants, product pre-sales, post-sales, sysadmins, operators of storage, you have to evolve to meet this new market. SAN and NAS do not matter anymore when customers are using the cloud services.

p/s: I have been spending time looking at some very, very cool cloud-ready storage operating systems. If you have the time, leave me a comment and we’ll talk. 😀