People have been reading my blog, or have heard me speak somewhere and often ask about the ‘money’ involved with Thin Provisioning or the order of events and the relationship to cost reductions. I have concluded that there is not a separation of the Storage Costs and the Cost Reduction Events. This is an easy concept to get mixed-up.

First, the costs are just that, costs or the money involved with storage and data ownership. These costs are wide and various. I have been blogging about 32 types of storage ownership costs. Some of the money is hard, some is soft, that is up to you. Some of the money manifests itself in the short-term, some in the long term.

The second part is the events, investments, activities or actions needed to reduce costs. Just because you have identified the costs does not mean that they will automagically go down. We have to make decisions on what things to do to have the costs go down.

This goes back to my old analogy of weight loss. We can determine how much weight we want (or need) to lose, but knowing the target does not make it so. We have to then determine a plan of actions (diet, exercise, omitting something) in our life to make the weight loss happen. This analogy works well with storage TCO reduction.

So some of the costs can be:

• Electricity
• Floorspace
• HW maintenance
• Labor to manage the storage
• Long distance circuits
• SW purchase for licenses
• Recovery time, and the business impact
• Cost of downtime
• etc.

Then some of the activities might include:

• Storage Consolidation
• Thin provisioning
• Implementing storage area management tools
• Defining better management processes and procedures
• Tiered storage and a services catalog
• etc.

There are many, many activites and investments to reduce the cost. New vendor solutions and technologies are being developed/discovered all the time. The mapping of the kind of money to reduce to the activity necessary to achieve those cost reductions is not a difficult task, but needs to be done in the context of a storage strategy or annual plan. Just like losing weight, we need to:

1. Plan
2. Commit
3. Act/implement
4. Measure
5. go to step 2/3 again

Trackback URI | Comments RSS