All this new interest in getting thinner
by David Merrill on August 27, 2010
Based upon the latest round of acquisition activity in our industry, it’s fascinating to me how – all of a sudden – the IT and business world have a new appetite for ‘clouds’ and ‘thinly provisioned storage’ and all the buzz with this technology. For those of us who have played in this space for years, we collectively say, “Yup, this stuff works well”.
I have written a lot about the economics of thin provisioning, the reclamation capacity now and the lower cost of growth in the future. HDS recently put a dynamic provisioning savings calculator on the web to demonstrate the savings, both now and later.
Thin provisioning technology saves CAPEX costs now and later. So does virtualization, archive, and de-dupe. The list goes on further when you consider changes to processes, organization, architectures, SAN etc. I continue to push a proactive plan to reduce costs now. We may be having a short reprieve on CAPEX limitations, but if we turn towards a double-dip recession, the belt-tightening will be more pronounced.
If you have a subscription, you might want to reference a recent IDC report entitled “State of the Market - Worldwide IT Spending Review & Forecast” for some good insight into recessionary trends and IT implications
Invest Now to Be Prepared Later
IT planners and architects need to look now at these technologies, and make the investments so that reclamation and lower cost of growth is possible if/when things get tight. Most clients with whom I work typically achieve a 25% unit cost reduction in about a year. This unit cost reduction is a result of identifying, measuring and reducing costs such as:
- Array based migration (with virtualization)
- Cost of waste (reclaim the space)
- Copies (move to a lower tier)
- Data distribution (with intelligent tiering)
- Management
- Power, cooling
- Floor space
- Outages
- SAN Costs
- Backup
Hey, if things don’t get tight - then taking these actions is still a good approach to reduce carbon emissions, floor space and improve management efficiencies.
