Manic Miner and Storage Resource Management

Chris M Evans — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:18:00 +0000

I tried a bit of nostalgia the other day. From a “freebie” CD-ROM I installed a games emulator for the ZX Spectrum, a personal computer that was hugely popular in the ’80s. The game I installed was called Manic Miner, one of the original platform games. At the time (1983) it was a classic and (shamefully) I even hacked the copy I had to remove the protection (you had to load a 4 or 6 digit code from a sheet of blue paper, which couldn’t be photocopied). When my children saw the game, they fell about laughing, not surprising when you compare it to their latest play, Star Wars Battlefront.

It made me think how things have changed in 20 years; from 32×24 graphics to 1280×1024 with advanced polygon shading etc. What has this to do with storage? Well, I ponder on what will happen to Storage Resource Management in the next 20 years.

I think what we’ll see is artificial intelligence-based software managing our data. The software will proactively fix hardware faults, relocate data based on our usage/value policies, provide CDP and CDR, deliver optimum performance and make all storage administrators obsolete.

Er, well all except the last one; yes I do think the worries we have about SRM tools will be resolved, however I think with the growth in capacity, complexity and features of todays storage, that Storage Administrators will be needed for a long time to come.

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Manic Miner and Storage Resource Management