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.

A year or so ago, my colleague Claus Mikkelsen made a bold statement to storage architects that in their planning they had to start assuming the price of disk to be at zero. Certainly at HDS, eyebrows were raised, but he is right, the price of the drive itself keeps dropping. When measured in the [...]

Like most people, I am hopeful that the long, dark 15-18-month IT recession is over. I like to read all the optimistic articles pointing to a comeback.

Lots of people write about new year’s resolutions. I am not going to elaborate on my one, you do not want to read about them and I may not want to share them…

I have been working this past week in Mumbai and Bangalore India, but still trying to keep connected with 2 hot topics in my world of storage economics: Storage Clouds and greenhouse emission standards coming out of Copenhagen this week. Let me see if I can reconcile these 2 topics in one blog entry…

The title of this blog come from Shakespeare, from Julius Caesar. This phrase is often misquoted as to pertaining canines that symbolize warmongers. The dog in ‘dogs of war’ is a restraining device, and the phrase takes on the meaning (after the murder of Caesar) of soon the man-made restraints are to be removed, and [...]

We have been showing clients for years how Storage Virtualization and Dynamic (thin) Provisioning saves money by producing higher utilization rates, and thereby reducing current and future capital expenditures. Better Utilization = Better Return on Asset (ROA). Your CFO will love that message.

You may have read or heard about the HDS agile cloud announcements last week at SNW. You may see the evolution in the announcement in that a few ingredients are added from time to time to extend the capability, but the key principles of cloud have been available some years now. In my view and [...]

I am not much a movie buff. Most of the films I watch are on a 7” screen on the back of a seat at 35,000 feet, and usually without headphones plugged-in. I do recall a football movie (don’t recall the title or actor) where an overconfident wide receiver repeatedly demands the team owner “shows [...]

Late last month, I read an article in the Financial Times entitled Prisoners of Inertia. Among other things, it mentioned an economic principle called the Endowment Effect, which describes how cost and uncertainty deter change. The article goes on to say that until consumers become dissatisfied with savings and start spending again, the global economy [...]