The Storage Economist

This week HDS announced HUS VM, filling the void for enterprise-class virtualization at a much lower entry price. See the details of the announcement here.

In addition to the powerful features and functions inherited from the VSP platform, HUS VM maintains most, if not all, the economic features of this flagship virtualization-enterprise array. HUS VM brings key cost reduction capabilities to small-to-medium enterprise data centers such as:

• Multi-vendor, external storage array virtualization, which brings a single-pane of management capability to smaller enterprise accounts. Tools and labor skills required to manage heterogeneous systems can be significantly reduced.
• Heterogeneous array-based migration costs are done 90% faster and at less cost than traditional methods at the array’s end-of-life.
• Virtualization produces space reclamation from a single (or from multiple) external arrays. This reclaimed space reduces short-term CAPEX spend.
• When combined with over-provisioning, additional space reclamation is achieved. Additionally, faster provisioning will put capacity into hosts much more efficiently.
• When combined with dynamic tiering, data can be re-distributed to the most cost-efficient tier. This is especially true for the re-tiering of copies.

The combination of virtualization, tiering and over-provisioning has been well documented and proven with customers around the world, now these cost-reducing features are available at a much lower price point. With the VSP architecture, we would tend to see the economic sweet spot of these features at around 120-140 TB. In other words, these capacity levels provided the economies of scale to justify the hardware and software added costs associated with virtualization. With HUS VM, the sweet spot is now as low as 30 TB.

Over the past few months I have been analyzing and creating economic use cases for HUS VM, and although each case is different (especially by country), our results show that HUS VM will produce TCO reductions of 30%. This rate reduction is based on comparison to modular and unified storage systems that do not provide external storage virtualization.The 30% TCO reductions are derived from:

• Reclamation of white space from externalized virtualized arrays.
• Lower power and cooling requirements for internal HUS VM capacity.
• Cost of migration.
• Simplified and unified storage management presentation through a single console.
• Commoditization of storage purchase as new capacity can be presented behind HUS VM.
• Reclamation of capacity from zero page reclaim (ZPR) and over-provisioning.

Storage cost reductions are not requirements for just the larger data centers. All IT operations are under CAPEX and OPEX pressure, so the ability to bring these proven cost reduction elements to small and medium enterprises is great news in tough economic times.