What comes after NAS and storage-area networks?
ISCSI is a different form of SAN on some level. Then you go to a higher level of abstraction to object-based storage where file naming is not the caprice of any one system or user but sort of a unified resource view of the world. Object-based storage is sort of the whole Web services view where you don’t need to know exact file names or paths, you don’t need to know this is an [Network File System] file or [Common Internet File System] file. I’m talking about ever increasing layers of abstraction that free you from knowing exactly what bits or blocks are stored where. What’s your sense of how the setup of network and IT shops is changing as relates to dealing with new storage technologies and architectures? At the CIO level what they’re having their heartburn over is seeing their network groups buy lots of [network-attached storage (NAS)], so storage is kind of escaping out of the province of sys admin types and being spread around. The challenge the CIOs have is not buying twice as mu
