Harvard Economics Professor Mankiw in a recent blog cited US government stimulus spending and the concepts on a non-measurable metric. This is an interesting read, as well as this counter viewpoint on how economics is chuck full of non-measurable metrics. The basic argument for un-employment and statistical achievements is summarized in his statement “You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus. [...] So he gave us a non-measurable metric.” On this topic, the New York Times reports that the president’s “jobs claims are based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs”. Pretty cool if we can get away with macroeconomic estimated without real counting.
Let’s take this to storage metrics, or Econometrics. Are there storage and management metrics that are non-measurable? Metrics that are based on macroeconomic metrics, and without any real counting? Let me list a few of my favorites:
• TB-per-person under management – This seems to be simple, divide all the capacity between the number of people supposedly managing storage. Simple right? This metric is full of holes since some of the storage admin team (if there is a dedicated team) also tend to look after servers, backup, DR tests, development, compliance requirements etc. These fuzzy metrics can be used internally (at best) to show how much more storage has been bought without adding headcount. It does not fairly represent the effective management nature of the staff and the data.
• Total cost of Storage – I do a lot of work in this space, but the metric does not describe the cost of data or information on the disk. TCO of storage is the container cost, but if the container is largely empty or full of copies or aged data, then the metric is meaningless. We have to better measure cost of 1st instance data or information. TCO per TB is very measurable (sum of all the costs divided by the total raw or usable capacity). TCDO (the D is for data) or TCIO (I is for information) are more difficult measurements, but far more meaningful to the data owners.
• Total cost per Transaction – Measuring costs per TB or MIP are great for the infrastructure, but the business really cares about how much does a transaction cost me to process? IT spend as a percent of total company revenue is a related metric. Transaction costs may be non-measurable due to the problem in isolating and defining a transaction.
• Total cost of acquisition - now this seems simple enough since we can query the procurement department on what was spent to but XX TB of storage. Again, we are measuring containers, and low cost containers may or may not adequately cover the business needs. Advanced containers cost more, but may do more in terms of operational , data protection, migration and discovery functions for the business. TCA of data or information is more meaningful, but potentially hard to isolate from the raw costings.
Any ideas on storage or IT metrics that are popular but non-measurable?
Comments (4 )
Pete Hise on 12 Jun 2009 at 6:40 am
One metric I hear tossed around is “price per SAN port.” Add up all the SAN ports and divide by the acquisition cost, so easy, right?
This is yet another shifty metric IMHO as not all ports are created equal. This goes for the type of port being measured, its application in the DC, the overhead required to continue operations, and of course the ports value to the business.
I like the concept of non-measureable metrics and I’m happy somebody is talking about it. Too often we hear - “Just do a TCO and we present it to our customer.” Aren’t our customers smater than that?
David Merrill on 12 Jun 2009 at 1:47 pm
Yeah I forgot about $/SAN port. This is used heavily in the SAN vs. DAS and SAN vs. NAS war. We have to have some type of measurement for the connection tarriff, do you use a better metric for this cost type?
The Captain on 12 Jun 2009 at 10:15 pm
Not to mention that some ports may be single mode long wave ($$$), others may be 10 Gb used for replication or 2 GB used for a tape drive. I always account for the price per N-Port to bring us to a level playing field. For instance if I deployed qty (10) - 100 port directors in a core - edge topology. Assume 2 are core and 8 are edge. I need to have any to any core to edge connectivity, thus I will run 4 ISLs from each core to each edge. Each core director will have a 32 port burn rate and each edge director will loose 8 ports.
What about intelligent cards in a director for some fabric service (encryption, compression, CDP, CRR, etc)? These intelligent cards are quite expensive and have no usable ports for all effective purposes. Yet when dealing with a customer’s procurement analyst in an RFx scenario, they don’t want to hear the techno jargon. They want price / # ports.
I won’t even get into patch panels and trunks, but I’ll say this. I’ve customers buy $2M worth of directors and spent $3.4M cabling them up.
This is exactly why economists like to use the phrase “ceteris paribus”…..I wish it were more widely accepted in IT disciplines.
david merrill on 16 Jun 2009 at 3:58 pm
You are right, but not all things are equal or stay equal. Economic metrics or econometrics have to consider constant changes in technology, performances etc.
As you mention, the $/usable SAN port can get skewed very quickly when you include all the cabling, patch panels, ISL ports etc. Lets don’t let that metric turn people off from SANs all together.