There is no Spoon - There's only Storage

Cloud architecture doesn't change the rules of scale in the large enterprise. The team that buys 1PB of SAN is more than likely the same team that buys 1PB of S3.

I’ve been irritated by a small startup with a great cloud-native storage solution. The company recently attempted to expand a well-known definition within the storage industry while saying its solution serves a new market. Why would the new market care about an old definition?

Because it’s not a new market at all, the buyer needing to purchase 1PB of data on a cloud-native platform is more than likely the same buyer needing to store 1PB of data on a Storage Area Network (SAN).

While developers are rapidly changing, it’s my experience that buying centers in the enterprise aren’t changing. A company needing to transfer 1PB of data from a windmill to a cloud data center looks to their network professional to source a solution that scales across all the windmills in the enterprise. The network professional must understand the cloud-native solutions to offer the developer.

In my experience, storage is the same situation. A developer may select a cloud-native solution that speaks to all of their needs in pre-production. However, 1PB of production data is expensive. The economies of scale for both cost and support enter. Chief Technology Offices (CTO) and Chief Information Officers (CIO) look to the experts in the infrastructure building blocks for these solutions. And the experts responsible for data services care about these definitions.

Therefore, the market hasn’t changed.

While rapidly growing, cloud-native is just a subset of the overall IT landscape and will always big one of the many things IT purchasing silos must manage.