Personaly: I was protesting THE WAR IN IRAQ. The war in Afghanistan has some relationship to the attacks on 9/11. The war in Iraq was foist upon us because they finally had the chance to get away with it by implying a relationship to 9/11 (with no proof). The war in Afghanastan was COMPLETLY mismanaged becouse it was back burnered to an unnecisary war in Iraq.... maybe it's not a Republicrat vs Democrin argument, I hate both Kodos AND Krang, maybe some of us think for ourselves.

Was the Afghan war necessary, that's debatable. Was it justified, I think it clearly was.Neither can be said for Iraq. /end Troll feeding

I'm a storage administrator, and I'll be the first to tell you the application knowledge rarely falls down to my level. When it does, half the time it's pure crap. The other half, we can architect something intelligent & I go home feeling good.

That being said:
Being on the other side of that wall, I do get fed up with the "I can just buy a bunch of disk, slap it in a server & call it a disk array" game. The software for redundancy on the level of quality of the crappiest clarrion array with dual SPs is just not there (it will be soon I think). Also, at a large enough scale, putting the slow IO bulk storage on the 'big expensive SAN disk' does make sense, in that you can use capacity on disks that may be near the IO limit but barely touched on capacity. This -CAN- cost less then buying/supporting another subsystem (like netapp). Most large companies have no way to charge you less for the lower IO profile though, as they just kick back the purchase price by GB :-( so you are subsidizing the IO of some IO hog, the company however, isn't spending more money to do this.

The real problems are
1) bean counters who are totally lost, but think they aren't.
2) application & server people who don't understand storage*, but think they do.
3) storage people who don't understand the app, but think they do.

you find the solution to THOSE 3 issues & you can write your own ticket!

(* most times the 'app people', don't even understand the shrink wrapped app they just purchased & the vendor IO profile is a crazy over estimated CYA)

Roughly, the end of WWII. Or if you're lazy, we'll just call it 1950.

And here I was looking for the up button for the space elevator :-(

Your dead on. Fibre channel drives are dead, they will cease to exist in the near/medium term future. SAS & SATA will live on. Fibre Channel as a transport (i.e. SANS) will be dead in the medium to long term future, giving way to the expansion of 10Gb CEE (maybe holding on in FCoE for a while).

The problem in 'the enterprise' is not the ability to find the different technologies (SSD, FC, SAS, SATA) for your workloads... the problem is finding which workload belongs on which of your technologes. Every application vendor & DBA I've ever dealt with wants raid 10 for everything, and in a shared SAN environment, in most cases it's unnecisary and in some cases it's counterproductive.

What we're seeing from some of the enterprise hardware vendors is two fold. a) using SSDs in the disk subsystem as a form of second stage cache for cache friendly workloads and b) intelligently reviewing every block by use and moving each block to the appropriate technology (SSD, Sata, FC, etc) to best service IO. Sounds promising, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Getting business & application folk to 'classify' there data for IO usage & throughput, especially before they've installed or written the app, is like herding rabid cats. So you'll end up buying SSDs for an app that will never leverage them or SATA for an app that needs SSDs, depending on what budget these folk could justify to there PHBs.

No way dude, that's a fake.... the REAL one is downtown Detroit right across the street from the Joe Lewis fist & a block or so from the Windsor tunnel.

http://tiny.cc/8mI9l

I mean, NOBODY'S gonna look for the Stargate in downtown Detroit. And if the aliens come through, they'll see Detroit & leave post haste.

Perfect plan.

FCoE does not allow you (yet) to ditch the fibre channel network. Very few (if any?) storage vendors are shipping native FCoE storage devices, right now your looking at iSCSI (worst of both worlds) or native FC. I wouldn't really trust FCoE for a large SAN without a CEE ('datacenter Ethernet') based LAN (lossless, in order 10Gb Ethernet standard, basicly the best of Ethernet & FC merged).

The real problem with FCoE (& FC in general) is that it is a notoriously misbehaved technology when doing vendor interop. So basicly Cisco is using it's ethernet dominance to push what should fundamentally be a better solution (one network for all) in order to push out the market leader in the FC space (Brocade/McData). For the near/medium term your going to need a FC storage core for you legacy storage devices & your NOT going to plug a Brocade SAN into a Nexus & get good results..... basicly, I hope you either don't have a legacy SAN environment or you have MDS switches in it already if you want to go that route any time soon.

Don't get me started on the silly political fallout of merging a network & SAN team in a large organization :-( (hint: the SAN team will lose as there are less of us)

By the way, anybody want to hire a SAN guy with ~7 years experience who's drooling for some IP and/or VMWare experience ? ;-) Something tells me the value of my current skill set is about to expire.

What you described is maybe half of the job (and in my opinion not the fun half). The other half is the constant churn of hardware/software upgrades. In a large enough datacenter there's always new equipment coming in and old going out, and those projects can be challanging & fun. I.e. replacing all the switches in a SAN, installing new bladecenters & migrating apps over, etc.

Somebody mod this guy up, that's hilarious.

say 2012 or so, you might be right, but right now.... not ready yet.

There's nothing wrong with it: unless your me & on the other side of it ;-)

Seriously, I think you just made the point I was trying to make in a shorter post. We are being comoditized, because we must be for the sake of progress. And there are too many of us who think we're a 'beautiful & unique snowflake' who could never be steamrolled by progress.

Not just us data janitors, but so goes the life of the source code assembly line workers before us.

NOW is the time to unionize, not latter when we can be replaced in a second. There's nothing wrong with being comoditized, there is something wrong with not realizing it.

"I don't know if a union is really the answer in IT, or in any professional job for that matter"

I think that's where your making your mistake. Trying to put my substantial ego aside, the business is trying there damnedest to make Datacenter IT folk a commodity, and it's working. We're decidedly not unskilled laborers but in most cases, no matter what we want to beleave, we can be replaced without a big impact to the bottom line. You are not a beutifull and unique snowflake. There is a substantial part of Systems Administration work that CAN be done from halfway across the globe, or by the guy in the cube next to you (or who's resume just hit the boss' desk).

Part of this comiditization is eliminating overtime pay, not respecting personal time and expecting we're available 24x7x365 for whatever whim management has.

A union, or similer group, are the collective bargening leverage that would make my (& your?) personal time a thing the company must value. Forcing the employer to have to take into account when the CIO is playing Veruca Salt on a Saterday "I WANT IT NOW!" for the project he'll end up canceling by Tuesday.

I'm not a fan of unions, don't get me wrong, but I think the pendulum is swinging too far in the directions of a Dickens novel these days & rugged individualism isn't fixing it.

I had to move back in after collage, couldn't find work for over a year... horrible horrible time.

When I moved back out again, my bedroom was gutted & converted into the home gym in under two weeks.

I love you too Mom & Dad. :-)

WHY GOD OH WHY CAN'T i GET A SPAM FILTER ON THE US MAIL?

I've signed up for the 'don't send me credit card applications' and something like the national association of direct marketers leave-me-the-fsck-alone list.

But I still get several pounds of TRASH sent to my house every week.

The only thing I want to see in my mailbox are government bills & notices (seems the government can't be bothered to move into the 21st century) and the once or twice a year post card I might receive.

Am I the only one looking FORWARD to seeing the US Post Office shut down?

The best bet is to be ready to blame the vendor when things go south ;-)

Seriously, I'm right there with you. If management does not want to provide for a test lab & reasonable time to test. Then it's clear they've made a 'business decision' that the network is not of sufficient value / risk is not great enough for such investments.

This may change quickly once something goes south (assuming they understand why it did) but you're gonna be talking to a brick wall until then.

It could be worse, you could have management that are afraid of there own shadows & who freak out at the idea of replacing redundant components after a HW failure. (Ever had to get VP approval to replace a failed GBIC? Oh, I have & yes, I hate my life).