The Storage Economist

The title of this blog come from Shakespeare, from Julius Caesar. This phrase is often misquoted as to pertaining canines that symbolize warmongers. The dog in ‘dogs of war’ is a restraining device, and the phrase takes on the meaning (after the murder of Caesar) of soon the man-made restraints are to be removed, and war will likely follow. Lots of mis-quotations of this phrase in the news this week with war build-up, and the error in blaming a family pet for the resulting escalation…

In IT terms, perhaps we are starting to see a thaw in the capital freeze, and we might ‘let slip the dogs of capital.’ During the past 15-16 months there have been many man-made capital restraints put in place to hold down spending, in order to pause and ride out a tough recession.

I have a quarterly conference call with our top HDS Storage economic consultants (Economic Black Belts) at which time we can review our common storage business cases and economic justification experiences from around the world. We had this call last week and heard some interesting perspectives from the Nordic region, UK, Canada, mainland China and the Americas. Now, we are not global analysts or business economists, but there are trends that are worth observing and documenting. From our call there appears to be signs of pent-up demand being addressed with end of year capital spends. Some of the key areas noted involve capital spending in :

• Backup augmentation or improvement investments. Backup windows and RTO are under pressure. VTL, disk-based archive methods are seeing renewed interest and investment
• Tiered storage is still very popular, especially with ever-greening replacement investments
• Storage consolidation into single, larger, simpler-to-manage pools. Mixing block and file data into a common architecture to manage
• Moving to thin volumes and different RAID levels with the ever-greening process
• Server consolidation and migrations to virtual machines often results in reviewing and upgrading the back-end storage infrastructure. This is especially true with the increased IO requirements of these VM, and striking a balance between scaling up (performance) and scaling out (capacity growth)
• Storage clouds (private) and storage virtualization investments to handle mixed workload (unstructured and block data) are getting some looks, and are starting to appear in test/dev and evaluation labs

This list is not comprehensive in any way, but an interesting snapshot from a few global consultants. We deal with the dogs of CAPEX, the restraints that are put in place for business reasons. Some of these dogs or restraints can be overcome due to secondary pressures:

1. Power and space consumption of an aging storage architecture
2. Poor utilization and low ROA measured from the existing architecture
3. Too many storage islands, storage management points (consoles) and management processes that result in the prior fragmentations
4. The need to harvest capacity from what already exists to meet the near-term demand
5. Performance problems (now or up-coming) from the growth in VM
6. Reducing or avoiding end-of-warranty maintenance fees

It seems it might be time in the IT world to “cry havoc” and start looking for good business cases to “let slip” some capital restraints.