The Storage Economist

A recent blog entry on Storage Monkeys mentions thin provisioning and the proper investments needed in implementation in order to achieve a TCO reduction. My comments are in that blog, but we should not be surprised that any new storage approach or technology can have an impact on TCO, but the investments are not free.
Over the years we have seen many new storage technology additions (SAN, De-dupe, VTL, Virtualization, Dynamic Tiering) and looking in the near future we see additional architectures (Cloud, JBOD nodes) that also promise reduced TCO.

All the changes in the past, present and future do require investments that are requisite to the changed being made, and the potential cost savings that are sought:

• People – skills and training
• Processes that need to be changed
• Architecture design done right. If you do not have the skills, get the vendors involved
• Transformation, migration from the old way to the new way. Don’t under-estimate the time and effort of this step
• Best practices – obvious changes are often necessary, too much to detail here in this blog
• Organization impact – we see blurring of lines between server teams, network teams, database teams etc. Some of these innovations impact several parts of the IT infrastructure and various groups are required to plan and implement together. Co-management is another consideration
• Political and attitude change – with thin provisioning for example, are projects and DBA going to be happy with thin volumes? Were your server admins and users happy (initially) with virtual servers? Something to think about in your internal marketing to storage consumers

As Signoretti mentions in the blog, ignoring some or part of these implementation dimensions can and will cause disruptions, re-work, lost time, opportunities losses that often increase the TCO of storage. The devil is in the details of all storage/IT implementations and architecture changes.