The Storage Economist

One of the first pieces of IT economics work that I did at HDS 13 years ago was on the ROI of Storage Area Networks (SAN). At that time HDS had started supporting and re-selling FC SAN products from Inrange, Troika, Ancor, CNT, McData and others. HDS had ESCON solutions for years (at that time), [...]

Actually the title of this blog should be “Cost Savings Sharing,” but that is not a very catchy way to draw you in.

This is the third and final post in a three-part series of excerpts from an upcoming paper on Hypervisor Economics (part one and two here).  Please share your comments, questions and feedback below.

In my next few posts, I’ll be sharing some excerpts from an upcoming paper on hypervisor economics. Feel free to provide comments and feedback below.

I have been marginalized.
With all the recent news and talk of budget caps, debt limits and austerity plans, it seems as if everyone is an economist these days. There certainly is a lot of frightening news, and some predictions that we may return to business and national economic patterns that we saw 3-4 years ago. [...]

When I started college, I first selected math as my emphasis of study. I think it was the second calculus class that helped me realize that multi-variable problems were not my strong point, so I dropped my math major and I chose (for me) a more systematic or logical degree in computer engineering.

I had a meeting with a State Government CIO this week. As is the case with most government clients, the discussion centered on cost reductions, and their perspective that in the future they need to “just buy cheaper disks” to get around their current IT budget difficulties.

For the past 12 years, I have been defining and refining principles, concepts, categories and models around storage economics. In the past few years, it has become necessary to move into adjacent infrastructure areas to identify, measure and reduce the costs of IT.

We have all heard it before.
“I can go down to <insert name of local retail tech store> and buy a 1TB disk for $60. Why is your enterprise disk so expensive??”

I’m always interested in the trends in storage economics and in identifying them, take into account as many sources of information as possible, especially among our customers.  Sharing these trends with you on this blog is an important focus, so it’s interesting to consider what generated the most interest over the past year.