The Storage Economist

A colleague sent me this interesting article from Chris Preimsberger while at SNW (I was not able to attend this year) about the CEO of Symantec telling enterprises to stop buying storage, and better utilize what they already have. He offered 4 key technologies (to invest in with the money you are not spending on storage) to accomplish this:

• storage resource management
• thin provisioning
• data deduplication
• intelligent archiving

The article goes on to describe how storage capacity can be orphaned and some typical techniques to reclaim capacity were outlined. It is interesting that the topic of storage virtualization was missing as a proven method to reclaim stranded storage. Another way to stop buying storage, is to reduce the amount of data created in the first place (I took some time off earlier in the month, so perhaps I missed the announcement that we have repealed SOX??). Most IT departments do not have control of the data growth appetite, nor of business demands, application demands etc. I have written for years about improving what we already have invested, and thus create a short storage-capital-purchase-holiday. But this is short-term, improving ROA during the current capital and credit crunch.

An interesting view of orphaned storage, or stranded capacity will vary you look at your own data/storage stack:

Storage Capacity Definition

• Changing RAID levels will impact the delta between RAW and Usable
• Array virtualization will reduce the waste between usable and allocated
• Thin provisioning will save space differences between allocated and used
• Deduplication will impact utilized and application content
• Archive will reduce both allocated and utilized volumes
• SRM will help in managing and monitoring all the areas above

The right architecture is needed to right-size the total storage estate. Look at short term and long term options to improve ROA and overall utilization.