The Storage Economist

We recently acquired a summer intern to compile, clean, index and organize assessment reports/models from economic work done at HDS since 2002. I hope to have an internal library of around 200 case studies, with the focus on more recent (last 2-3 years) assessments. As I have compiled and reviewed my own work during these [...]

I enjoyed reading Hu’s blog on JBOD and the tight integration needed for today’s applications. In the spirit of adding on to this discussion, I tend to see patterns around JBOD usage that deserve some additional (econ) attention:

Many of our customers want to reduce storage costs, and they know that just focusing on price is only part of the effort. As people understand that there are many costs associated with storage TCO, reduction of these costs first requires a basic understanding of what costs are important to them. I have done 4-5 [...]

I am in the middle of a multi-part blog series on some of the secondary cost benefits of storage virtualization. I posted an entry last week on virtualization’s impact on maintenance, and now will talk about the cost of copies.

Good news for all who have been afraid or reluctant to jump into financial or economic discussions around storage and competitive storage architectures. Thirteen years worth of experience and insight around costs and cost reduction options is now available in a simpler-to-use format. My colleague Justin Augat has abridged hundreds of documents, blogs, white papers [...]

This is the first in a series of blogs that discusses the impact of enterprise, controller-based virtualization and the impact to secondary costs. By secondary costs, I mean costs that are not usually and obviously measured with virtualization initiatives. In this entry, I will outline the impact of storage virtualization to array hardware maintenance.