I’ve attended a couple of Tech Field Day events, and watched/participated remotely (in both senses of the word) in a few more, and each event seems to embody themes and trends in the field covered. Storage Field Day 5 was no exception.

I found a couple of undercurrents in this event’s presentations, and three of these are worth calling out, both to thank those who are following them, and give a hint to the next generation of new product startups to keep them in mind.

This post is one of a series of two, for your manageable reading pleasure. Part two is now available here.

Be sure to check out the full event page, with links to presenters and videos of their presentations, at http://techfieldday.com/event/sfd5/

1. Predictability and Sustainability Are The Right Metrics

There are three kinds of falsehoods in tech marketing: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks. Many (most?) vendors will pitch their best case, perfect environment, most advantageous results as a reason to choose them. But as with Teavana’s in-store tasting controversy, when you get the stuff home and try to reproduce the advertised effects, you end up with weak tea. My friend Howard Marks wrote about this in relation to VMware’s 2-million IOP VSAN benchmark recently.

At SFD5, we had a couple of presenters not stress best case/least real results, but predictable and reproducible results. Most applications aren’t going to benefit a lot from a high burst rate and tepid average performance whether it’s on the server hardware, storage back-end, or network. But consistent quality of service (QoS) and a reliable set of expectations that can be met (and maybe exceeded) will lead to satisfied customers and successful implementation.

One example of this was with Diablo Technologies, the folks behind Memory Channel Storage implemented by Sandisk as ULLtraDIMM. In comparing the performance of the MCS flash implementation against a PCIe storage option (Fusion-io’s product, to be precise), they showed performance and I/O results across a range of measurements, and rather than pitching the best results, they touted the sustainable results that you’d expect to see regularly with the product.

Sandisk themselves referred to some configuration options under the hood, not generally available to end users, to trade some lifespan for daily duty cycles. Since these products are not yet mass market on the level of a consumer grade 2.5″ SSD, it makes sense to make that a support/integration option rather than just having users open up a Magician-like product to tweak ULLtraDIMMs themselves.

Another example was Solidfire, who also advocated setting expectations to what would be sustainable. They refer to “guaranteed performance,” which comes down to QoS and sane configuration. Linear scalability

2. Your Three Control Channels Should Be Equivalent

There are generally three ways to control a product, whether it’s a software appliance, a hardware platform, or more. You have a command-line interface (CLI), a graphical user interface (GUI) of some sort–often either a web front-end or an applet/installed application, and an API for automated access (XML, REST, SOAP, sendmail.cf).

I will assert that a good product will have all three of these: CLI, GUI, API. A truly mature product will have full feature equity between the three. Any operation you can execute against the product from one of them can be done with identical effectiveness from the other two.

This seems to be a stronger trend than it was a couple of years ago. At my first Tech Field Day events, as I recall, there were still people who felt a CLI was an afterthought, and an API could be limited. When you’re trying to get your product out the door, before your competitor locks you out of the market, it could be defensible, much as putting off documentation until your product shipped was once defended.

But today, nobody should consider a product ready to ship until it has full management channel equality. And as I recall, most of the vendors we met with who have a manageable product (I’m giving Sandisk and Diablo Tech a pass on this one for obvious reasons) were closer to the “of course we have that” stance than the “why would we need that” that used to be de rigueur in the industry.

Once again, this is part one of two on trends observed at Storage Field Day 5. Part 2 is now available at this link.

This is a post related to Storage Field Day 5, the independent influencer event being held in Silicon Valley April 23-25, 2014. As a delegate to SFD5, I am chosen by the Tech Field Day community and my travel and expenses are covered by Gestalt IT. I am not required to write about any sponsoring vendor, nor is my content reviewed. No compensation has been or will be received for this or any other Tech Field Day post.