After the recent valuations associated to Software Defined Networking startup, storage companies have decided to get on the band-wagon.

Proving that there is nothing new under the sun, I wanted to lay claim to having been a visionary in the space 😉

And for the record, much of this work would have not been possible without an extremely talented set of senior architects, in particular Jim Voll.

In 2003 Steve Kleiman, then CTO of NetApp, brilliantly noted that storage was a physical system that was going to turn into a software system. And that managing the software was going to be the problem in the virtualized data center.

He was right. And I spent 4 years trying to understand his insight. In 2008, shortly before I left NetApp, I got it…

But then I decided to go work on games.

Because a claim without proof is just a claim, let me refer to two papers I wrote.

The first describes a way to do software defined storage for the problem of managing storage withstorage of data replication:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa-07/policy-driven-management-data-sets

The second describes the problem that increasing software virtualization of storage was going to create and the need for a new paradigm for management.

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1320000/1317404/p38-roussos.pdf

NetApp then delivered a product, Provisioning Manager, which implemented a lot of these ideas.

In both of these articles, I called for re-thinking storage management from a hardware system to a software system and proposed an approach that would allow humans to manage the complexity.

Nice to see the world catching up 🙂