The Storage Economist

What is wrong with this picture?

If you guessed that water and hard drive manufacturing do not mix, you are correct!

Recent news articles are covering the floods in Thailand and the manufacturing impact to disk drives for the remainder of 2011. Some articles are predicting a rise in the price of drives by 10% in early 2012. Other shortages and demands for consumer markets will put pressure on enterprise quantities. I don’t think that rationing is in the forecast, but you may recall the impact of supply/demand curves when there are restraints on supply.

Global events of flooding, earthquakes, or the European debt crisis may seem like a far-away problems for an IT architect or storage planner, but we have to ingest these global events and make provisioning for our own IT plans on how these may impact price, costs of ownership, availability, etc. We have to accelerate internal capabilities to ‘do more with less’ and have some contingency plans in our back pockets if worse-case scenarios do materialize.

There are technology, process, operations and procurement ‘levers’ that can be positioned to offset unforeseen events that may impact your ability to acquire capacity. I have blogged about these for years, but the most popular these days include:

• Storage virtualization to reduce waste and reclaim usable capacity
• Thin provisioned volumes to reclaim capacity
• Compression, de-duplication to reduce backup capacity
• Dynamic tiers of storage to put data in the right place, for the right cost
• Storage cloud offerings (lower tiers, archive) to pay-as-you-grow this type of capacity
• Chargeback, showback and other internal schemes to help reduce the appetite of IT infrastructure capacity
• Consider collapsing or refining the data protection schemes (that are currently in place) in order to reclaim resource. Do you have too much coverage of infrastructure to protect your apps and data?
• Does your procurement process inherently waste capacity with a buy-ahead approach?

I do not want to be a chicken-little and claim the sky is falling, but it is important to keep an eye on the sky, as well as your balance sheet.