Charging for the Waste
by David Merrill on June 10, 2010
I came across this interesting article highlighting Wafu restaurant in Australia where the owner charges the customer for the food not consumed in his order. Sort of a penalty for bad behavior….
From what I can gather the owner is:
• Conscious about waste prevention
• Tired of people ordering things and then not consuming them
• Trying to change behavior on a small scale to eat what you buy
• Serious about protecting the environment
I like the mantra of the restaurant owner: “To contribute toward creating a sustainable future we request a little more of our guests than most other restaurants… We are not only committed to serving meals that nurture and respect the body but are actively dedicated to the notion of waste prevention, and take seriously our responsibility toward the environment and sustainability for the future.”
I wonder if the portions offered have changed with this program? I think my next trip to Sydney will be to Wafu!
Now let’s apply this to storage consumption. I think, as an industry, we are at a tipping point with over allocation of storage capacity, and the finance people in our organizations showing their displeasure when presented with Return on Asset (ROA), consumption metrics or utilization metrics. Perhaps there can be mechanisms to discourage wasteful behaviors? Feel free to add your own solution…
1. Implement a chargeback system. This continues to be unpopular, even in the face of tough economic purchasing times.
2. Within a chargeback system, offer significantly different rates for thick and thin volumes
3. If chargeback does not work, try a show-back system, where monthly reports or management metrics are used to reflect overall ROA for the IT infrastructure assigned to a group or organization
4. Offer two different provisioning models:
a. Fast provisioning (hours, days) for thin-provisioned volumes
b. Slow provisioning (days, weeks, months) for thick volumes
5. Capital review process includes a department or line of business (LoB) to report on usage trends, utilization, usage of de-duplication methods to better improve what they already have
6. Move to a centralized allocation and storage pooling governance model to centrally re-distribute un-used capacity
7. Put in place proven technology to aggressively reduce waste/white space
a. De-dupe
b. Virtualization
c. Dynamic tiers (move seldom used volumes or poor performers to a lower tier)
d. Thin provisioning
8. Transform to a service utility model (or subscription service) to pay for (virtual) capacities that are consumed, not allocated
