And the Word is: Reservationless

OK, even I thought my last video was weird, but its nice to have it confirmed by Simon Sharwood's weekly storage dish last week.   (As a lover of blogfo-tainment, I look forward to his weekend roundup of the storage blogosphere with my usual hidrosis, knowing that his diagnosis of my public neurosis - without prescribed  pharmaceuticals to expand my gnosis - might cower me into sleeping late on Saturday morning.)

Here it is a new month and a new week and a new opportunity to expand the vocabulary of storage blogging with a new word!  We won't be talking about clouds today, or even allocation sizes except to say that computer engineering is not an exercise in Newtonian mechanics as the folks at Hitachi seem to think. 

The new word for month of August (at least!) is RESERVATIONLESS.  You can try to look it up, but it does not seem to be an official word in any dictionaries that matter.  Whatever, you already know what it means, unlike words like "CLOUD", here shrowded in verbosity by Chuck Hollis or "GREEN", as discussed by William Shatner (the SHAT) here.  (Is it just me or does it make sense that I just put Chuck and the SHAT together in that thought?)  This could be a new storage blogosphere meme - Chuck Hollis as the SHAT of storage!

Reservationless means that you can do something when you want to or need to as opposed to making plans that may or may not work out.  You know how it is, you make a dinner reservation at the hottest new restaurant for 4 and then for significant-otherly reasons you show up 10 minutes late with a party of 6. Or you make a prepaid reservation for a Hotel and a late night arrival and an early morning presentation - only to arrive and find out the place is next to a switching yard.

Reservationless means you can adjust your plans as you need to without penalty.  Reservationless means you don't have to pay a penalty for changing plans.  Reservationless means you can have access to resources without painful rework to change the plans you already put in place. Reservationless means you don't have to undo anything - because you never had to do it (whatever it is) to begin with.

3PAR InServ storage arrays are Reservationless, by design.  You don't have to reserve snapshot capacity that you might not ever need, you don't have to create special pools of disk drives that are only used for thin provisioning and best of all you don't have to pay for professional capacity planning services that you end up changing later anyway. 

Back to today's new storage meme:

 

Comments

[Chuck Hollis]

The awful truth: I *like* William Shatner.

Regarding your point around "reservationless", sure, that's a nice property for any shared infrastructure to have (including clouds), but -- at some point -- someone has to do some capacity planning and put some iron on the floor.

Keep searching for that perfect word, Marc. I haven't found it yet -- hence the verbosity.

P.S. do you think I need a rug like Mr. Shatner? I understand that the Hair Club For Men is looking for new members :-)

-- Chuck

[marc farley]

Chuck,

I like the SHAT too. He boldly goes places in entertainment that most others don't and for the most part he succeeds. You don't have the same self deprecating style that the SHAT does, but you definitely explore a wide range of topics. My advice - skip the rug; it will only attract tabloid journalists and more serious readers could accuse you of vanity.