The SNIA is in the process of writing its three-year strategic plan, and Franceschini (who is also the senior director of future technologies for Hitachi Data System and a ) gave me a quick roundup of the major challenges facing the storage industry.

"Storage solutions need to be further integrated with other layers in the datacenter," Franceschini suggests, adding that "The storage industry needs to start collaborating a lot more with other datacenter players. For example, [SNIA has] a working relationship with the ."

My conversation with Franceschini touched on numerous interesting topics, including ("SNIA and Aperi are still talking, and we will have a working relationship on that front"), the possibility of SNIA generating code ("We are not considering an open source model"), and extending the SNIA communication channels via blogs ("Funny that you mention it -- we were just discussing using blogs and other tools like wikis").

Without discounting the importance of the others, that opening mention of grid computing seems to me to be the most interesting and promising topic. "We know that [OGF is] working on a new infrastructure model with some level of orchestration middleware that will touch on storage and data management at some point in time, and we want to make sure that the storage industry is positioned there," Franceschini says.

Storage grids are a potentially controversial topic, as I realized later on while talking to Gary Francis, senior vice president at Crosswalk. In April, , an intelligent storage grid system. The name is a rather blunt but clarifying self-introduction -- if you know what a storage grid is, that is.