A Thinner, Greener You
May 18th, 2007
“Does this storage array make my hips look big?” I know this is probably the front-end of a really bad data center joke, told late at night during a microcode upgrade. Nevertheless, our storage arrays are sort of chunky… lots of excess waste or unallocated (or unallocatable) capacity that is visible by IT management. When storage arrays are fat, with poor utilization, stranded capacities, and over-engineered, then it is time for a storage diet.
In a time when IT budgets are under pressure, management is placing a closer eye on ROA. Problem is, with annual data growth rates at 30-100%, we cannot afford to go on a diet. Perhaps you have been part of, or overheard a conversation between an IT money man and an IT techie guy:
Tech: I need to buy some more storage for our growing business.
Finance: You have lots of spare capacity.
Tech: Oh common, disk is cheap.
Finance: But the CIO wants better ROA!
Tech: But the storage team is already maxed-out!
Finance: But we are wasting 50-60% of our capacity!
Tech: But it is too hard and time consuming to do a reclamation project !
Finance: But our capital expense cannot support more spending at the current levels of waste!
Tech: It is cheaper to buy disk and waste it then to reclaim or manage it.
The above dialog can go on and on, and it is too painful to write any more.
A recent development may be a source of help with these conflicting issues - Thin Provisioning. This technology has been around for a little while, but with new announcements this week this technology enters the high-end storage arena. These links can take to you announcement and other press sites.
Thin provisioning can help reduce wasted space (white space) by 20%. That is a lot of thinning, providing better ROA!. Furthermore, this technology when mapped to storage virtualization is environmentally very attractive. According to ITCentrix:
“ITCentrix’s analysis of market leading high-end storage solutions shows that for I/O-intensive configurations of between 54 terabytes to 134 terabytes, competitive solutions consume 24- percent to 52-percent more budget for power, cooling and space over a five-year period than comparably configured Hitachi USP Vs using virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning,” said Dave Vellante, president and CEO of ITCentrix.”
Another source for the economic impact of virtualization bundled with thin provisioning in an enterprise-class storage array, this article is from ESG.
Thinner and Greener, a powerful combination for TCO reductions in the storage space.
