While driving back to my hotel this evening from a clients site I had an interesting thought… Now I wonder how it can be applied to virtualization and storage…
Here’s the thought:
I grew up in a little town in Kansas and I knew all the back roads and roads that didn’t exist and all the cool places to visit. Yet while I’m in St. Louis I don’t know all of this information. I don’t have the slightest. I’m dependent on google, my cell phone, and my GPS to figure out where I’m heading. I bet if I were to put you in my home town you would be the same way. I guess you can think of this as relational unawareness.
This unawareness in relation to where we are is so natural that everyone does it without even thinking about it. If you don’t believe me, get lost! Literally. Drive or walk to somewhere you’ve never been before. Use a different path or road to get back to a place you know where you’re at without using technology. It’s not easy.
This is engrained in human nature, why can’t we create storage and virtual systems that are this way by default? Mutually autonomous systems. Discrete systems that while interacting with one another are oblivious to things farther away from themselves. Yet very knowledgeable about their own surroundings. Very similar to a heard or swarm but unique in the concept that it becomes aware of its surroundings.
So instead of knowing about all of the systems in my cloud the system only knows about the ones it interacts with regularly. This can be thought of as a school bus (not short bus jokes please), it has lots of stops to pickup youth and one destination. The driver is very aware of who’s supposed to get on and where as well as many other situational aspects surrounding the transport of children. Yet at the same time if you asked the bus driver to drive to a different town to pickup one child that situational awareness is lost. The bus driver becomes inefficient.
Why can’t we build storage and clouds with this sort of logic? Move our data in relation to how it interacts with other data, we’re not talking defraging, that’s linear, this is non-linear, like the Wonkavator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It goes up and down, and sideways, and slant ways… you get the idea.
This same thing applies to our clouds… lets move them so that our services are floating around next to the things they use. This gets really cool when you start putting desktops and end user apps in the mix. What would our clouds look like? What becomes the center of the cloud. The users or the data? Would it be the same in all clouds? Would it stay the same in a cloud or would it change?
Imagine a hybrid cloud… where do the edges of the cloud meet? What do those edges look like. How do the services above or below or to the side impact that fuzzy gray area? When is it public cloud when is it private? The questions are absolutely endless.
You can say this nonsense or that’s how the cloud already is (it’s not). That’s fine and you are entitled to your opinions. As am I. And I will close with a quote from Roald Dahl – “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”
Think big, you may wind up with your head in the clouds!
Tony
