The Storage Economist

These days, credit is tight. For many, capital spending is frozen or postponed. Yet the growth of data  and information does not want to yield to these capital pressures. That is where observation #2 comes into play: Disk Reclamation.

For every GB or TB that can be reclaimed, that is another part of the capital spend that can be eliminated or deferred. For many open system storage infrastructures, the amount of waste or white space presents a provocative alternative and management need to know what could be achieved (relative to capital avoidance or deferral) with some reclamation. Here are the basic tactics:

Well if you add up all the results of the last column you will see that the sum of these parts is well over 100%….. that is great, getting back more space than what you have! Actually many of the above actions are mutually exclusive, and need to be compared to each other in terms of ease, best return on the effort, return on asset (ROA) etc. Not all tactics can be done in parallel.

In my work around the world, I have seen clients literally reclaim enough disk capacity FROM WHAT THEY ALREADY HAVE ON THE FLOOR to sustain their data business growth for 6-15 months. Now it can be argued that reclamation is more expensive than purchasing more disk, but that may only be true if you have the CAPEX to spend on new disk. In some micro-economic circles, the efforts to reclaim current (sunk cost) capacity is a vital tactic for 2009.

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You bring up a great point, with deferred capital expenditure these days, its hard to sell anything to anyone anymore.

I sometimes don’t buy these great optimistic post in the IT blogosphere about promoting technology and infrastructure investment in these troubled times, with tight credit and practically shrinking IT budgets, this is one thing that is not happening currently.

In the past I have a made similar comments on Chuck’s blog about how efficient thinking can move the market in a different direction not necessary the direction some OEM’s want it to go in, http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2009/01/efficient-thinking.html

There was a recent post by Chris Evans on a similar topic of data reclamation,
http://thestoragearchitect.com/2009/01/28/storage-management-aperi-its-all-over/
where he explains the data reclamation technology using Storage Fusion
http://www.storagefusion.com.
We are a business partner of storage fusion in the US and provide services around data reclamation, etc. Again I don’t want to sit here and talk about what we do, rather want to talk about the fact, not everyone these days can incur capital spending.

With current economic woes, IT managers have to keep up with existing challenge of growing there infrastructure leveraging existing technology with zero capital budgets,,,

2009 is the year of challenges and will redefine the way we do business…..

Dave/Devang – just read these comments after I wrote a new post – http://thestoragearchitect.com/2009/02/12/enterprise-computing-storage-reclamationoldor/ – these ideas are great but as Devang says, need to be backed up with practical execution.

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[...] buying storage; and an entry on physical reduction, which is different from reclamation. Then a stand-alone entry on basic disk reclamation; and one from the Storage [...]

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