Other than the Olympic Games, no other event brings the world together like the World Cup. It is a connection that spans almost every demographic. It crosses race, gender, politics and age groups, and connects all of us, even us Americans who are now getting a clue a about soccer…er, football. Okay, we are still working on the name thing. Right after I had this thought, I was on the Nike site thinking about ordering a U.S. team shirt when I saw this one and I had to order it. I laughed at first, but it showed how we are connecting with the rest of world and learning to merge and converge.
It is on the theme of merging and converging that I wanted to focus for this blog. In some ways, this reminds me of the management groups of IP and storage coming together. They have heard of each other, they share a data center, but they really don’t know the rules of each other’s games and they use the same words that mean very different things to one another. Each of these teams has built a specialized set of skills for playing their respective games and many overlap, but they are still very different games.
Common Skills for Each Game
The IP and storage games require that each admin/player understand networking principals and understand wide area capabilities for hot sites and replication. Each require that they understand HA and teaming/multi-pathing skills, server virtualization connectivity and many other requirements. These skills are like many all-around athletic skills, but we know that each sport requires a set of very specialized skills and strategies.
Playing the IP Game
When it comes to playing for the IP team in the data center, the game requires that you also understand Telco via Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP), video, NAS, iSCSI, virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) and over-the-wire security, as well as other key skills that the storage guys don’t typically have to be trained on to compete.
Playing the Storage Game
On the storage side, things like deduplication, back up, tape archiving, storage arrays, snap shots, tiered storage and dozens of other key tools and skills are required to manage storage. As we learned from the introduction of iSCSI, managing storage takes specialized skills, policies and strategies that have nothing to do with the type of network that connects them to the server.
Learning and Converging
What this means is that moving toward network convergence is not football (with a round ball) vs. football (with an oblong ball…is it really a ball if it is not round? A subject for another blog). It is a new hybrid game that requires new tools, new rules and a new kind of teamwork to succeed. In the spirit of bringing the world and network together, check out our new unified management webcast that will show you the latest in open, unified management for network convergence.
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