The Storage Economist

I came across this article with some not-so-revealing statistics on IT spending trends year-to-date, and the prognosis for 2009.

The correlation of corporate profits and IT spending is also not surprising either (from the US Govt. Bureau of Economic Analysis):

In a down economy, will the demand for data and storage also turn flat? Probably not, the data genie is already out of the bottle. Proactive planning and investments (people, process, technology) will be required to sustain data growth with little or no increase in the IT spend. Storage tactics to increase the return on asset (ROA) of existing IT infrastructure, in order to squeeze more life and usage can be characterized/summarized as follows:

• Data cleaning
• Demote older data to lower tiers
• Delete or archive capacity to fee up space
• When new purchases have to be made, invest in mid-to-lower tiered storage. This requires a conscious tiering strategy:
• With dynamic data movement, primary volumes, copy volumes and DR volumes can be moved to lower tiers, freeing up the higher tiered capacity
• Archive tiers are much cheaper to purchase than tier 1 space
• Re-balancing the storage estate with a dynamic tiering architecture can significantly impact what is stored, and where and for what cost
• Consider Storage virtualization as a mechanism to:
• Extending the useful life of arrays by knocking off some or all of the SW and HW maintenance fees, using the fully depreciated disk as a lower tier for the enterprise (a dedicated copy tier for example)
• Reclaiming stranded capacities that may exist with arrays that are in islands (tiered, SAN, otherwise) in the storage infrastructure
• Enable data mobility, although this is another function that is implemented separately
• Data De-duplication
• Primarily as a back-up pre-processor, we are seeing more in-line options emerging

Thin provisioning is compelling architecture to reduce total disk consumption over time. I tend to see this less as an immediate reclamation option, but for more driving new storage allocation behaviors on net-new growth. Most new volumes allocated to applications can be thinned volumes, so the improvement of space usage and allocation is better in the future.

HDS consultants’ experience indicates that most mid-to-large clients have enough capacity (or body fat) to live off for 6-15 months. The trick or effort is to make the necessary changes and investments to enable the use or reclamation of this capacity to get through tough economic times.

I like this article from Andrew Reichman of Forrester, “Five Key Storage Strategies for a Down Economy”. One of his key recommendations is storage virtualization. If you do not have that subscription, click on the above link and you’ll find a summary of the findings.