One of the more interesting high-tech market shifts to observe has been the popularity of consumer storage and its' rise into the commercial sector. At the same time customers in this low-end commercial sector are asking for enterprise-class (and enterprise-hardened) features and functions in their storage devices.
As EMC developers have talked to customers about this phenomena (bringing enterprise-class features into smaller accounts) there has also been much discussion about user interface (e.g. GUI) technologies. The consistent message from customers sounds something like this:
When you bring enterprise-class storage technology into our business environment, don't bring your existing user interfaces with them.
There are many reasons behind this request:
- These customers are often storage novices (IT generalists). Any graphical interface that mentions a LUN, cache, zoning, etc., is potentially wasting screen space. These terms can get in the way of executing the main task (quickly allocating storage for a specific application). Drill-down, storage-specific menus and tree-views would likely never be used.
- A multitude of devices may be used to manage the storage, including traditional laptops and desktops, as well as smaller handheld devices. These smaller devices aren't as receptive to UI technologies that host enterprise-level business logic.
- The storage provisioning task makes more sense in the context of an application. Provisioning would be easier if it were done using terms familiar to the administrator, e.g. Hyper-V/VMware VMs, Exchange mailboxes, or SQL databases.
- Any storage monitoring tasks (e.g. events, alerts) are more easily received when they are phrased and handled in the terms of the application that is impacted/affected.
- The other interfaces in the customer environment are actually a good guideline for a management interface to the storage device. This translates to some of the "big icons" that are common in Windows 7 or MAC OS X.
- Browser technologies are commonly used for other IT management tasks in these environments, and Adobe Flash technologies get high marks. The penetration rate of Adobe Flash is high (flash player penetration statistics).
Unveiling Storage Concepts
One of the main discussion points from the above list is often the first item. Can storage interfaces be completely devoid of some of the underlying knobs and dials that allow for storage tuning?
The answer that continues to surface is that application-based tasks should be "wizard-like". As a user clicks through the suggested best practices, it makes a lot of sense to provide "advanced" tabs that introduce storage jargon and provide the option to manage the storage device in a more granular fashion. In fact, as the user becomes more storage-savvy, it was also suggested that the system automatically recognize this and unveil even more terms (and perhaps more granular knobs and dials).
About 18 months ago (at EMC World Orlando) Chris Evans and I were discussing this very topic. We both agreed that automating common tasks while also providing granularity would be of immense value to enterprise customers as well.
Building to Requirement
When looking at all of the above requirements it became clear that it didn't make sense to morph or otherwise shoe-horn enterprise user interfaces into products that are created for smaller businesses.
It also seemed quite clear that many of the requirements from customers at smaller businesses, if implemented properly, would be quite attractive to enterprise customers as well.
So the decision was made to start building an internal library of re-usable GUI widgets using Flex technology. Common login screens, alerting frameworks, wizard frameworks, and navigation schemes were developed with the intent of sharing across product lines. This approach for management software is very akin to the re-usable componentization occuring on data path software via the CSX technology.
Chad posted a good video describing the move to Flex and showing screen shots of some of the new look-and-feel.
In addition, there is a VPLEX demo that illustrates the re-use of these Flex components in enterprise-class deployments.
Architecturally, the move to Adobe Flash has also resulted in a separation of storage management business logic into a separate layer. This positions the development team to create non-Flex user interfaces in the future (without having to re-write business logic).
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
Comments