by David Merrill on May 16, 2012
I am in the middle of a multi-part blog series on some of the secondary cost benefits of storage virtualization. I posted an entry last week on virtualization’s impact on maintenance, and now will talk about the cost of copies.
by David Merrill on May 14, 2012
Good news for all who have been afraid or reluctant to jump into financial or economic discussions around storage and competitive storage architectures. Thirteen years worth of experience and insight around costs and cost reduction options is now available in a simpler-to-use format. My colleague Justin Augat has abridged hundreds of documents, blogs, white papers and case studies into a book that you may find interesting. Follow the link below to read (on-line) Storage Economics for Dummies.
by David Merrill on May 3, 2012
This is the first in a series of blogs that discusses the impact of enterprise, controller-based virtualization and the impact to secondary costs. By secondary costs, I mean costs that are not usually and obviously measured with virtualization initiatives. In this entry, I will outline the impact of storage virtualization to array hardware maintenance.
by David Merrill on April 30, 2012
Storage virtualization has been proven to reduce many different types of storage related costs. Most notably the costs of migration, asset purchase, cost of waste, floor space, electricity and many others are reduced with controller-based, heterogeneous storage virtualization. When building a business case to move to a virtual, flexible, content-and-information-cloud architecture, these cost areas are most noticeable and demonstrable.
by David Merrill on April 27, 2012
My one key message (for the past 12 years) is that cost reduction is not accidental; it takes a determined and structured approach. I have simplified the process to be 3 steps: identify, measure and reduce. Some previous blog entries on these topics are here: Read More »
by David Merrill on April 25, 2012
The past 3 blogs have covered the economics behind reclamation (of disk) compared to buying new disk. My material has focus on reclamation due to storage virtualization, over provisioning (thin provisioning) and zero page reclaim. The same methods can be used for other capacity efficiency techniques to be sure. The other blogs covering the setup, calculation and cost awareness leave us to the final segment, looking beyond price. Reclaiming disk essentially extends the useful life of the asset. And while “on the surface” this sounds great, there are cost implications that you need to understand and measure/compare to make an informed decision.
by David Merrill on April 23, 2012
This is my 3rd installment of a 4-part series on when/how it is cheaper to reclaim disk as opposed to buying new. The previous 2 entries covered the setup and calculations, now we will look at conditions when each tends to be better.
by David Merrill on April 20, 2012
My previous blog entry discussed the opportunity of deciding if it is cheaper to reclaim (poorly utilized) disk compared to purchasing net new disk. This blog entry will setup how to calculate a simple reclaim vs. buy analysis.
by David Merrill on April 18, 2012
Disk prices are rising. I hope I am not the bearer of bad news, but you have probably heard, or seen for yourself, that recent natural disaster and supply problems have caused some disk prices to rise. This is not good at a time when (for most) there is still pressure on CAPEX. Unless you can get capital budget relief, you will have to spend more to deliver the capacity levels needed for growth in the short-term.
by David Merrill on April 9, 2012
Ever since we started decentralizing IT resources in the golden-era of client/server (mid-90s), we have been working to reign in the sprawl by consolidation recommendation. As soon as we consolidate, there will be another reason to sprawl (perhaps next time in someone else’s cloud infrastructure). Consolidation has been an effective technique for many years to reduce costs, and it implies several activities and resulting cost reductions: Read More »
David Merrill
Chief Economist
