Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Joe Pucciarelli of IDC.  He had some interesting insights on IT budgets. From his data points he believed that IT administrators had set aside some reserves at the beginning of the year in anticipation of rising utility rates for power and cooling in the data center. Those increases did not materialize or were not as severe as was expected when oil was at $70 bbl at the beginning of the year. As a result, he believed that there were excess funds which could be used to buy more storage in anticipation of next years demand. 

While many storage vendors would encourage customers to spend those excess funds on storage capacity, I would recommend that any excess be spent on bring the management of that storage under control before investing in more storage, especially if it is not needed today. The price of storage capacity erodes over time, so it doesn’t make sense to buy more than you need at any time. 

The most important tool for managing storage is an intelligent control unit with virtualization capability and supporting tool set to maximize the use of exiting storage and simplify management of storage and data services. 

To some people this may sound contradictory since storage control units, especially enterprise ones come with a lot of storage. In the case of HDS storage, you can buy an intelligent storage control unit from us without buying any storage, since we have separated the intelligent control unit functions from the commodity disks. This enables us to attach existing FC storage to this control unit and map all our latest data and storage management services to this storage as though it were our own.  

So if you find that you are coming into the end of the year with excess storage budget, consider investing in controller based virtualization and increase the utilization of your existing storage before you spend it on buying more storage capacity. 

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