My Offensive iSCSI Blog (My Philosophy of Communication)

It seems my blog on whether iSCSI is SAN or NAS is offending people:

 

Mario Apicella asks, “Is the man losing it?” And then he points people to a short Dell video explaining iSCSI that he says is more “politically correct” than mine. (It’s worth a look.)

Marc Farley says that it’s a cop-out for me to simply “let people believe what they want to believe,” and gives me the wagging finger of shame.

In that blog I said, “Many technical people are offended by the idea that iSCSI might be NAS.” Sure enough! Here are two technical people offended by my post. (At least I know my audience.)

In some ways, that blog was more about a philosophy of communication than about iSCSI.

When I’m communicating badly, it’s often because I don’t understand how my audience thinks. The words and ideas I’m using don’t mean the same thing to them. But if I take the time to hear and understand their worldview, then I can speak their language and communicate better. Sometimes I even change my own worldview.

That blog is the story of what happened when I took the time to understand how business people think about their storage.

When I first encountered business people who thought that iSCSI was NAS, I reacted just like Mario and Marc: I thought they were idiots and I wagged my shaming finger at them. But when I learned that their worldview is based on infrastructure, capital expenses, and organizational structure, I realized that to them, iSCSI really is more like NAS than SAN.

The idea of iSCSI as SAN is incompatible with their worldview, and if I speak that way, I will confuse them. I might accept Marc’s finger of shame if I were harming my audience, but in fact I am helping them by using words in ways that clarify and not mislead.

Does this mean that business trumps technology? That we should categorize iSCSI as NAS? No! That would be equally misleading to the technical people. iSCSI is a block-based protocol, so in terms of how you manage it, and how it interacts with applications – key parts of the technologist’s worldview – iSCSI is very much like SAN.

I consider business and technology to be equally important. Since categorizing iSCSI either way will be confusing, I refuse to categorize it at all. I simply list all three names instead of just two: SAN and NAS and iSCSI.

Plato had advice on this subject: “Why should we dispute about names when we have realities of such importance to consider?”

Sometimes I think that technical people do themselves a disservice, when talking with business people, because they focus too much on technical details that don’t matter to their audience, instead of focusing on the issues that do. Don’t waste time on irrelevant categorization; spend time on how to save money with iSCSI. In this case, audience trumps speaker.