Don't listen to me, I don't know what I'm talking about – a pundit speaks

What the puck is going on?

Storagebod A day rarely goes by without someone declaring one technology or another is dead and rarely a year goes by without someone declaring this to be the year of whatever product they happen to be pimping, or be in favour of.

Yet you can often find dead technologies in rude health and rarely does it actually turn out to be the year of the product it is supposed to be the year of.

It turns out that pundits (including me) really have little idea what technology is going to die or fly. That is what makes the industry fun and interesting.

The storage industry is especially good for this: SAN is dead; DAS lives; NAS is obsolete; object is the future; iSCSI will never work; scale up; scale out.

We know nothing.

The only thing we do know is that data volumes will keep getting bigger and we will need somewhere to put it all.

In the past three months, I’ve seen technologies in what everyone will have you believe are innovation-free zones that have made me stop and think: "But I thought that was going to die?"

Yes, we have far too many start-ups in some parts of the industry. Far too many people have arrived at where they thought the puck was going to be, with a few people still skating round where the puck was.

Then there’s a few people who have picked up the puck, stuck it in their pocket and hidden it.

So my prediction for the next eighteen months: Bumpy – with the chance of sinkholes.

My advice: Don’t listen to the pundits, we know nothing. We just love the shiny things. ®