In Time for Easter

Continuing my previous rant…

The wonderful Italian poet, Dante, was a storage administrator.  Those, like me, who are steeped in the Humanities as well as tech, might recall this little illustration.  Dante invisioned nine circles of hell, each designed for a different type of neredowell whose misdeeds placed him on the short path to Hades in the afterlife.  Here’s a reminder…

 

 

  

Why does it strike me that Dante was prophetic about contemporary virtualization?  Well, count how many “circles” of virtualization there already are in storage before you add server/storage virtualization…

 

 

  

There you have it, folks.  There is nothing new under the sun.  Dante knew all about server and storage virtualization…and he knew that only really bad people would need to live through the hell of it: hyperbolistic vendor marketecture, failovers that don’t work as advertised — unless you use the vendor’s FS (and even then only sometimes), more hype from the pay per view analyst community, a paucity of articles on the foibles of the approach (“The virtualization companies are buying all the advertising, so we aren’t going to run articles that are critical of their products…”), etc.

Happy Easter, everybody. Be good and virtualize only if it makes sense.