The Storage Economist

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:

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.

The past 3 blogs have covered the economics behind reclamation (of disk) compared to buying new disk. My material has focus on reclamation due to storage virtualization, over provisioning (thin provisioning) and zero page reclaim. The same methods can be used for other capacity efficiency techniques to be sure. The other blogs covering the setup, [...]

This is my 3rd installment of a 4-part series on when/how it is cheaper to reclaim disk as opposed to buying new. The previous 2 entries covered the setup and calculations, now we will look at conditions when each tends to be better.

My previous blog entry discussed the opportunity of deciding if it is cheaper to reclaim (poorly utilized) disk compared to purchasing net new disk. This blog entry will setup how to calculate a simple reclaim vs. buy analysis.

Disk prices are rising. I hope I am not the bearer of bad news, but you have probably heard, or seen for yourself, that recent natural disaster and supply problems have caused some disk prices to rise. This is not good at a time when (for most) there is still pressure on CAPEX. Unless you [...]

Ever since we started decentralizing IT resources in the golden-era of client/server (mid-90s), we have been working to reign in the sprawl by consolidation recommendation. As soon as we consolidate, there will be another reason to sprawl (perhaps next time in someone else’s cloud infrastructure). Consolidation has been an effective technique for many years to [...]

I’m out of the office this week—and I plan on continuing my big data case study series as soon as I return—but quickly wanted to reiterate something Claus posted last week.

Last week I posted an introductory blog about big data and some work I had done a few years back in this space (before it was called big data). I have a couple of these large TCO assessments in my library, but will just share 2 or 3 of these that have the easiest story [...]

We live in a world of measurements, metrics and comparative standards. IT may have to consider more measurable gain justifications in order to compete for limited CAPEX and OPEX dollars. I like this quote from Thomas Monson who said: