Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill

I like Sean Chandler’s column on the System i Network. He’s been around a bit and tends to take a slightly jaundiced view of the next big thing, discarding the hype and looking for the parts that might be useful. This month its the turn of “The Cloud” and the claim that they can solve all of your Big Data Problems.

Big Data refers to the expanding volume of unstructured data (email, Word documents, PDFs, and so on) that businesses accumulate and – increasingly – are obliged to retain. The problem is twofold; firstly you have to find somewhere to put all of this stuff and, secondly, you need to be able to retrieve it reasonably quickly. For this, “The Cloud” is often touted as a one-size-fits-all solution, often by people who understand marketing better than they understand IT.

Chandler hits exactly the right note when he says:

The key word there is “supplement.” Cloud-based storage doesn’t replace tape storage. It doesn’t replace near-line disk storage. It’s simply another tool in the toolkit. You may want to, for example, move archived data to both cloud storage and tape storage selectively. For instance, full system backups are better suited to tape, but targeted file backups may reasonably go to both tape and cloud storage.

Technologies come, technologies go, technologies are reinvented. When new technologies are announced, or older technologies are reinvented, they are often surrounded by a great deal of hype and an endless array of breathless commentators telling us how this new shiny thing will change the way we work, play, communicate, eat, sleep, or whatever. Nothing ever lives up to this hype, however, and it’s often when the technology goes – or disappears from the headlines – that it begins to become useful. This is the point when the marketing pressure starts to ease off and people can begin to look at how the new or changed technology can be realistically used.

Cloud storage is here to stay. But it won’t begin to become a useful tool until the press stops talking about it.

Dawn May makes a good point:

Finally, in closing, I just want to make a simple observation – if i were to suddenly disappear tomorrow, the world as we know it would change significantly. So much of the world’s business runs on i, hidden away where it silently toils, day after day. Think about it…

The IBM i doesn’t receive as much attention as it deserves within the mainstream tech press. And among the more general press, it’s practically unheard of. In many ways this is unfortunate, but it is also a reflection of the sheer reliability of this system.

It doesn’t tend to be used for all of the flashy customer-facing stuff that attracts all of the column inches but what it does do – and do well – is handle all of the dull but essential process upon which the flashy parts depend. When you walk into a shop there is a good chance that an IBM i somewhere in the supply chain ensuring it’s fully stocked. Similarly, when you visit a web site to order a product online, there is also a good chance that the allocation, picking and shipping of your order is being handled by an IBM i.

In short, there are a huge number of IT processes on which we all depend and the dependability of the IBM i makes it a natural choice to manage these processes.

It’s not flashy and we often take these things for granted. But we would all miss it if it wasn’t there.

And a word of appreciation to Angus the IT Chap for the sterling work he continues to do in helping to promote what is still the most powerful, stable and reliable business system in existence.

Via IBM i for everyone!