“Does this storage array make my hips look big?” I know this is probably the front-end of a really bad data center joke, told late at night during a microcode upgrade. Nevertheless, our storage arrays are sort of chunky… lots of excess waste or unallocated (or unallocatable) capacity that is visible by IT management. When […]

I have been working with several large clients the past month, and have seen again first hand the importance of making storage architecture changes that are consistent with where one is. I know that sounds like bad english…. and it probably is. IT planners and architects want to take advantage of new technologies to improve […]

I attended a CSC Consulting conference this past week, and listened in on a forum on Virtualization, and the operational benefits of this approach with servers and storage. I was intrigued to hear the comparisons and differences between server virtualization (and hypervisor) and storage virtualization. Some of the talk went into how virtualization helps reduce […]

I have to apologize for allowing 4 weeks to pass between postings. My son was married last week, and between work trips to Mexico and Chicago over the past month, my time has been limited.
A colleague in England wrote me last week and made some comments on a recent blog entry on using IOPS as […]

This is item #28 of the 32 types of storage ownership costs. This single category generate more discussion than almost any other items in the list of 32.
The basic premise is that high rates of waste (white space, unallocated, allocated but not used) represents an opportunity cost to the IT department, since capacity was purchased […]

I have been a bit neglectful of writing about the 32 types of storage ownership costs. This entry is an extension on item #26 - Storage Performance as a cost of ownership.
Many may see performance cost as a soft cost, and it can be hard to provide cost savings or expenses unless we look at […]

A couple of years ago, I was consulting for a large Canadian Telco customer. They told me they were achieving 80TB-per-person for their storage infrastructure. I found this ratio impossible to believe. As we got deeper into the topic, I found that many of what I considered basic labor functions were not factored into that […]

Introduction
Storage economics is a suite of methodologies, tools, services and planning tactics that help IT Departments identify the total cost of storage ownership, and provides strategies that help reduce ongoing costs. Disk price is only 25 percent of the total cost of owning the disk over three to four years, so most of you need […]

Well it is here, the 1TB disk. I recall my second desktop PC after I came to HDS 11 years ago had an internal 1GB disk, and telling my kids how much stuff can be stored on that machine. So a 1,000 x improvement in about 8 years, amazing.
Capacity is great, it will be so […]

I was reading some old articles while at the airport yesterday; several sent to me from colleagues around the world were on the topic of environmental costs and the IT impact to electricity consumption. I have noted this impact in a recent blog as electricity costs are one of the 32 that make up storage […]