Don’t Call It A Comeback

I’ve Been Here For Years…

Ok, look. I know what I said before: I retired the jersey. But like all of the best superheroes, I’ve been forced to come out of retirement and face a fresh challenge… maybe my biggest challenge yet.

Back in 2012, I started this blog at the dawn of a new technology in the data centre: flash memory, also known as solid state storage. My aim was to fight ignorance and misinformation by shining the light of truth upon the facts of storage. Yes, I just used the phrase “the light of truth”, get over it, this is serious. Over five years and more than 200 blog posts, I oversaw the emergence of flash as the dominant storage technology for tier one workloads (basically, databases plus other less interesting stuff). I’m not claiming 100% of the credit here, other people clearly contributed, but it’s fair to say* that without me you would all still be using hard disk drives and putting up with >10ms latencies. Thus I retired to my beach house, secure in the knowledge that my legend was cemented into history.

But then, one day, everything changed…

Everybody knows that Information Technology moves in phases, waves and cycles. Mainframes, client/server, three-tier architectures, virtualization, NoSQL, cloud… every technology seems to get its moment in the sun…. much like me recently, relaxing by the pool with a well-earned mojito. And it just so happened that on this particular day, while waiting for a refill, I stumbled across a tech news article which planted the seed of a new idea… a new vision of the future… a new mission for the old avenger.

It’s time to pull on the costume and give the world the superhero it needs, not the superhero it wants…

Guess who’s back?

* It’s actually not fair to say that at all, but it’s been a while since I last blogged so I have a lot of hyperbole to get off my chest.