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My black hole theory of computing...
Tue, 18th Feb 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

This is my unified theory of the computer market, technology and industry. I would like to call it the “Black whole theory”.

So here goes, the universe, IT industry expands with new features, then as the weight of these features becomes commonplace or to large.

Then these features get pulled by gravity into the operating systems (OS), which is analogous to a planet. You have solar systems (hypervisors) or virtualised systems, planets etc grouped together.

This continues in parallel with new universes (OS), planets (programs) and black wholes being continually created and collapsing. Therefore, similar to black holes, the CPU, server OS will ultimately swallow up all functions and features

Actually the operating system or hypervisor running on the CPU will turn into a black hole and do this. This is why we see rich storage features from VMware, Hyper-V and new filesystems like ZFS appearing and then becoming integrated and standard.

We also see Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) being created in different incarnations (parallel universes), even though strictly speaking these are not that closely integrated into the OS, just appear in different packages . Some problems with this.

As Steven Hawking explains, some things can escape from black holes e.g. hawking radiation. Also, black holes are apparently grey. Therefore since everything is actually a wave when we get the bottom of things in places like CERN with the Higgs Boson, we have waves of centralisation and decentralisation.

Today all these social programs such as youface and booktube (yes an applet is a program) are installed on our mobile computers, yes a mobile phone is a computer as is a tablet.

These, planets are the ones that cannot sustain sufficient life and sometimes just move around a Sun or a solar sysem as a dead planet, but are often pretty when seen from a telescope.

Marketing is also included within this unified theory, these are the asteroids (bad marketing), that is hard to see or understand or comets (good marketing as they bring water) that shine and move between the planets coming and going but really only carrying one story, which sometimes contains ice, precious metals or ugly useless jagged rocks.

If you ever get hit by a marketing asteroid most of them just burn up pretty quickly, the big ones can be quite spectacular for a short time until they come around again, but usually it is the same message in a different part of the sky or just aimless drifting and trying to find something to do.

Dark matter or programmers pull all of this together and using background radiation or creativity and the universe continues to expand.

This is all quite simple to understand if you look at everything at the instruction level, which after all is what all the programs (planets) are made form be it servers, storage, networks or applications.

Well anyway what this means for storage admins is that , if you are in a deeply virtualised environment you can now use the hypervisor to migrate data between old and new storage arrays.

You can use these features as a wormhole avoid black holes and asteroids.

By Valdis Filks - Gartner Analyst