The Storage Economist

After a nice week of vacation, I am back in the UK working with a few of our strategic accounts. As the economy and CAPEX pressures continue to dominate the IT planning discussions, the message around ‘doing more with what you have’ tends to resonate much better (and higher up the org chain). I am always faced with skepticism around investing in new architecture elements (virtualization, thinning capabilities) in a time when capital is nearly impossible to obtain. In fact CAPEX for growth is also under more scrutiny with clients I’m meeting.

The common message within my work this week (and most weeks) is changing the architecture to allow you to be smaller, faster, and more cost efficient.

Tightening budgets are calling for more creative tactics to identify, measure and reduce costs. Squeezing budgets is like squeezing into tight jeans (bad analogy) but the facts are that we can reconfigure many current infrastructure architectures and re-purpose arrays to be virtualized, enable thin volumes and dynamic tiers. There are measurements taken that can show the potential to be in a storage set of pants 3-4 sizes smaller. Here are 2 quick examples of what was determined to be the result of moving to a virtual, thinned storage platform:

• One client plan was to go from a 1900TB raw storage estate to 1200. That is a 35% impact.
• Another situation storage estate went from 250 TB to 186TB, a 26% reduction.

RAID is not the problem. Yes, I am seeing some clients migrate volumes from RAID 1 to RAID 5 for reclamation, but all things being equal, there are other areas to look at. Even ignoring the data reduction potential (de-duplication, archive, deletion, quotas), there is space reduction. In the graphic below, you can notice that there are 2 areas to address:

• Usable but un-allocated
• Allocated but not used

Keeping the amount of data the same, and the ratio of RAID overhead the same, virtual and thinned storage can attack directly the red and yellow sections of the storage estate. The results:

• Reduced floor space, removing 7-10 frames
• Reduced power
• No need to do a tech refresh, they will just decommission the arrays, even though the capacity is already there and ready to be re-purposed
• Retire the HW and SW maintenance
• Less asset headaches, CMDB management, provisioning and touch effort

Now the other option with this reclaimed capacity is to grow into the recovered space over the next few years or months. I was a little surprised in these 2 clients’ interest in decommissioning the arrays all together and reducing the footprint now. They plan to still squeeze more organic growth out of the existing infrastructure with other efforts (mentioned above) and are really interested in short-term gains by retiring assets right now. Rather than take the reclaimed space for organic growth, they are opting to decommission arrays now and reduce the OPEX costs now. I will be interested to see if they can get into an even smaller pair of pants…..

This just in from my colleagues in Thailand.