The Storage Economist

Can you think and talk in 3-dimensions? Our theater-going experience seems to have taken on a 3-D standard as of late; perhaps our operational, technical and economic metrics around storage is about to do the same.

Lately, people have asked me about the difference of ROI and ROA, both techniques that we use in defining storage economics. Here is my IT-econ perspective.

With the announcement of the USP-V storage platform, HDS now offers HDP software and functionality for Thin Provisioning. Gartner, IDC, ITCentrix all have written extensively about this technology. All of the papers that I have read talk about the qualitative benefits, I would like to dig into to qualitative info on this technology.

I came across an interesting paper on Data Compression and the Return on Investment with this technology. Many of these concepts may not apply to data center storage, but an interesting point of view with local files and how micro or macro compression techniques reduces disk space and network bandwidth.

In my white paper on Storage Economics, we discuss the several activities or initiatives that IT departments can undertake to reduce storage OPEX. These activities fall into a range of effort and paybacks, as depicted in this graphic.

Jumping into a discussion on Storage Economics is easy. We all want to talk about money. Getting it. Spending it. Saving it. Money (or finances) economics are part of our natural human nature, and the IT nature. Problem is, we often count the wrong types of money or look at money in too narrow of [...]