The Storage Economist

I have had many different blog entries over the years dealing with verifiable, real, tangible cost reduction tactics. Doing more with less, or at least doing more with what you already have. We talk about the cost of waste, reclaiming waste, and having a strong enough constitution to go to your management asking for the investments to really improve utilization, ROA and total costs.

I am glad to see the new HDS announcement on a guarantee program related to 50% reclamation. This should give you that confidence to take on a management challenge now.

Granted, HDS is not the first with a guarantee program. But 2 years ago a Norwegian colleague and I crafted a guarantee program, but the legal and business issues were tough to overcome at the time. Still, vendors are putting their money where their mouth is. During the past months in reviewing various TCO and cost reduction guarantee programs, we had several discussions with Gartner’s April Adams. She publishes an article about every year on how different vendors setup and run guarantee programs. You should check this article out. I am pleased that the HDS guarantee offering is clear, transparent and void of a lot of fine print. Of course not every storage environment will qualify, but the announcement tells us up-front the conditions and situations that provide the best economic sweet spot.

The general premise of this program is that with virtualization and thin provisioning, you can put the current storage capacity and workload in an environment that is half the physical size. This does several things for your environment:

• The reclaimed capacity can be re-purposed for future, organic growth
• The reclaimed capacity gives you a CAPEX holiday of sorts for some period of time. Remember, when you do buy again it will be at a lower cost (thanks Mr. Moore’s Law)
• When you do start buying again, your fundamental growth slope will have changed. Remember that you can provision virtual and thinned volumes and that will change your rate and cost of growth
• If the excess capacity is not retained, then you pick up valuable floor space, reduced power, lower HW and SW maintenance (unit cost TCO goes way down)
• You will be able to demonstrate a higher ROA on your storage assets. Your CFO will like to hear that
• Not only do you get 50% of your space back, you move into an economically superior architecture (virtualized and thinned) that can extend TCO savings way beyond the space reclaime
  • Lower cost of migration
  • Simplified, heterogeneous storage management
  • Slower cost of growth (new cost of growth slope)
  • Faster provisioning (mean time to provision
  • As a percentage, lower costs of SW licenses and maintenance fees
  • Better carbon footprint for storage
  • Ability to vend dynamically tiered storage
  • Data de-referencing, with qualities that enable you to have local, private multi-tenant storage clouds

This offer includes services to ensure the money and reclamation are there, if they are not, then we don’t waste each other’s time and efforts. That is important so that you can chase other TCO reducing options.