The Storage Economist

In my last post, I discussed the difficulty in accurately projecting new storage demand and the options available to the storage team to present new growth slopes with new/different storage architectures.

Quite often while discussing cost-reduction, we draw a simple x-y graph that depicts: Flat, or nearly flat IT budgets, year over year Increasing demand for storage (and VM apps) capacity, usually at a 30-50% growth-rate year-to-year The requirement to drive down unit costs to allow the growth-rate, given a flat budget

My last blog presented some of the same operational and capital pressures for mainframe that we see most often, on the open systems side of IT. This entry will present some of the key storage architecture technologies (again emphasized and somewhat perfected) from the open systems side and applied to the mainframe storage environment.

I am speaking at SHARE this week in Anaheim, and my session will be on the economic impact of storage virtualization for the mainframe. My session details are here if you happen to be in attendance.

I had a colleague call and talk about an economics analysis (cost reduction strategy) that he was starting with a large client in Asia next week. The customer wanted to know our “best practices” around cost, cost measurement and cost reduction. After doing this type of work for the better part of 13 years I [...]