Henry Newman on the 'Dumbing Down' of Data Storage

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Over at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman writes that, while the industry has addressed storage complexity with NAS, SANs, and appliances, storage admins will require a whole new set of skills to meet the future challenges of application storage.

So if you are a skilled, highly talented administrator, what should be your plan to ensure that your salary does not take a nose dive? I think the answer is appliances for data analysis. (I am likely not talking about Hadoop, as many of the architectural designs for products in this area are completed.) Data analysis appliances are in their infancy today and will require significant care and feeding. The types of data analysis are going to be very complex. For example, you might de-pixelize an image and create a database of geolocations, normalizing for the resolution of the image, which might change over time based on improvements in technology. Then you might correlate the pixels to look for weather, climate or some other change like deforestation. This will be far different than taking business data and trying to correlate prices to sales to maximize profits.

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