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What better way to start a new year than to plan and build something brand new? My pet project would be an enterprise storage system. (OK, I really had my eye on that do-it-yourself Ferrari Portofino kit, but this is a storage column after all.) Unfortunately, my extremely limited engineering abilities and all-thumbs hands mean I won't be able to cobble my dream enterprise storage system together myself. My imagination doesn't have those limitations, however, so I'll describe it here. I want my new storage system to do everything and to do it well. Some of the newer storage techs that have gotten a foot in the data center door over the past few years share a common theme: Storage has been too hard -- hard to buy, hard to set up and configure, hard to use and hard to maintain. Easy, the new industry byword, might be a difficult concept for some storage pros to wrap their heads around. However, today, LUNs are shunned and provisioning is no longer a three-day turnaround, but rather a menu pick for end users. HCI to the max ...