Storage administration is a world of its own, controlled by storage administrators, running by their own set of rules. It's got to stop!
Not entirely, of course. Storage is a specialty, and it definitely rewards having someone really know all about it.
Think about it from an application programmer's point of view. What if files had the same rules as storage? Instead of just adding a "create file" statement to your program, you'd have to request one from the "file administrator," who may give you one after talking with you. You would agree on the name. You would talk about how big the file would get, and how often you intended to access it.
If everything went well, you would each go off to your respective domains, enter exactly the same information into your respective systems, and the file would be available. It would almost certainly be created before you needed it (better that than after you needed it!), and be set up to give you ample space.
What would be the net result?
- You and the "file administrator" would spend more time setting up files.
- There are more opportunities for mistakes and mis-communications.
- The files would be set up longer than needed, and possibly larger than needed.
- They wouldn't be deleted automatically by your program -- the file administrator would need to be notified.
In other words, the situation would be worse in just about every possible way. More time, more chances of error, less automation, more resources used longer than necessary.
Fortunately, this was a hypothetical for files. We have language-specific versions of "create file" and "delete file," so that applications can control their own lives, and programmers can program and be done with it.
Unfortunately, this is daily reality for storage! Bummer! Why shouldn't applications be able to control storage the way they do files? This may not matter much for persistent storage that doesn't change much, but it matters hugely for storage that is used on a temporary basis. Most places that I've looked at don't think about it any more. Why should they? They just over-provision like crazy and be done with it.
This situation changes the second you've got a simple set of API's you can call from scripts or applications that do for storage what we already know how to do for files. This is a capability all storage vendors should provide. Can you guess which one of my favorite storage vendors has a real story on this subject? Good, check it out...
Actually, just going to their website isn't enough (for now), since the RESTful API for storage administration is still in advanced beta. But it's real, it's cool, I've seen it, and they're even starting to admit its existence, per Brian Reagan:
CTO Steve Sicola detailed the Q1 and Q2 roadmap, including CorteX (coming in Q1) – Xiotech’s RESTful API that will allow developers simple yet powerful access to ISE.
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