IDC recently reported a drop in storage revenue. This could be due to a) economic conditions and restricted capital, b) users are buying the same or more capacity but at lower price points, c) manual and automated reclamation efforts are presented once-stranded capacities, or d) all/none of the above.
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Harvard Economics Professor Mankiw in a recent blog cited US government stimulus spending and the concepts on a non-measurable metric. This is an interesting read, as well as this counter viewpoint on how economics is chuck full of non-measurable metrics. The basic argument for un-employment and statistical achievements is summarized in his statement “You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus. [...] So he gave us a non-measurable metric.” On this topic, the New York Times reports that the president’s “jobs claims are based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs”. Pretty cool if we can get away with macroeconomic estimated without real counting.
In this second blog on the topic of DAS economics, we can outline one dimension of comparison and that is total cost of acquisition, or TCA. It seems obvious that DAS storage architectures have a lower TCA than SAN-based pooled or enterprise storage. The unit cost of direct attached storage is much lower at the until level than their FC-based equivalent. But there is more than surface-level analysis needed to determine the true TCA in some types of storage architectures. Remember this discussion is on DAS architectures and the comparisons to other FC SAN storage architectures. more
Well there has been lots of exciting new from HDS and our worthy competitors the last few weeks on high-end architectures, clouds, virtualization, etc. While this is important to note, I’d like to focus my next few blog entries will be on a more basic storage architecture, Direct Attached Storage or DAS. Many people have forgotten the olden days, pre-SAN, when direct attach was the one and only storage architectures. There seems to be a renaissance in relation to DAS, especially in the cloud architecture space.
Perhaps you have seen these types of carbon footprint calculators. Without travel, I generate 4.1 tons per year of C02. With my travel, my footprint goes up to 31.5. Yikes! It is interesting to note that 1 gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2, while my domestic and international flights generated 0.6 pounds of CO2 per person per mile. I thought my summer cooling bill in Texas would be the culprit, but it must be those AA trips to Omaha that are expanding my footprint.
I recall clearly traveling a few years ago amid the SARS outbreak, and the preventative techniques in place throughout Asia. The airports in Taipei and Hong Kong all had infra-red cameras, and if your body temperature was suspicious they would pull you aside for additional testing. Each day in the Singapore and Hong Kong offices of HDS we had to take our temperatures, and record them in the lobby’s log book. Hotels had precautions, including the requirement of medical disclosures as I would check in.
Back around 4-6 U.S. presidents ago, the concept of Voodoo Economics emerged, which are simply economic ideas that seem attractive but that do not work effectively over a period of time. The time period and the theory supported supply-side economic principles, and the reduction of corporate and individual tax rates to spur the economy.
A colleague sent me this interesting article from Chris Preimsberger while at SNW (I was not able to attend this year) about the CEO of Symantec telling enterprises to stop buying storage, and better utilize what they already have. He offered 4 key technologies (to invest in with the money you are not spending on storage) to accomplish this: more
Our government is talking non-stop about transparency and accountability, as it soothes fears around budget spend and government interventions. I would like to plug these same 2 qualities in terms of storage management and cost controls. If it sounds like I am trying to lobby for a coveted government post (I am caught up on my taxes over the years), you can rest assured that Hitachi is politically satisfying enough for me.
After a nice week of vacation, I am back in the UK working with a few of our strategic accounts. As the economy and CAPEX pressures continue to dominate the IT planning discussions, the message around ‘doing more with what you have’ tends to resonate much better (and higher up the org chain). more
