The $700 B bailout bill was passed by the U.S. congress but stocks continued to slide on Friday. It looks like we are headed for some bad times. Last Monday my mail box was flooded by analyst reports down grading most of the stocks of storage providers. The only exceptions were some companies that provide de-duplication or thin provisioning technologies that can increase efficiency of storage during a down turn. 

The last time we had a down turn was during the .com bust. At that time the technology that helped us recover was FC Storage Area Networks. This enabled us to replace 6 to 8 storage frames with one FC storage frame that could be connected to 8 or more servers over high speed 1Gbs Fibre. Suddenly data centers that were bulging out of the walls with direct attached 1TB and 2TB storage frames were able to recover large areas of floor space and reduce power consumption which they could switch over to blade servers.

The move to FC SAN involved a significant investment in infrastructure, recabling the data center, HBA’s in the servers, new FC storage systems, FC switches and new SAN management software. It also required disruption to applications and host systems as the only method for migration was to rip and replace the storage systems. With 1 and 2 TB storage frames that were direct attached to servers, this method of migration was acceptable.  The acquisition of new FC storage and SANs had an ROI which more than made up for the cost and disruption. It provided consolidation and growth that helped IT recover from the .com bust.

Today we are facing a banking and investment bust which will draw down revenues and wipe out investments in assets, and we will need to call on new technologies to help us leverage existing investments to get to new levels of consolidation and efficiency. There are many new technologies which can help, including, de-duplication, thin provisioning, dynamic provisioning, tiered storage, and life cycle management in an active archive. However, in order to take advantage of these new technologies, a migration to new infrastructure has to occur, and the old method of rip and replace migration will no longer work.

Thanks to the consolidation brought about by SANs, storage frames now have 10, 40, 100 TB or more of data and hundreds of applications that are inter-twangled across storage frames, making it difficult and costly to migrate data from an old storage frame to a new storage frame. Migration takes many months with the old and the new frames sitting, powered up on the data center floor, while applications are scheduled, one by one, for migration over weekend windows. The burdened cost of migrating a large storage frame may be around $10K to $12K per TB!  

The key technology that is required to address consolidation today is data mobility, the movement of data to new, efficient, infrastructures without disruption to the application, and this type of data mobility can only come about through storage virtualization.

If that storage virtualization can also provide de-duplication, thin provisioning, dynamic provisioning, tiered storage, active archive, and other technologies to increase utilization and efficiency as a service to storage that it virtualizes, than your existing storage investments do not have to be replaced.

If you have to invest in a new storage device in order to benefit from new technology like thin provisioning, the cost of rip and replace migration would negate any savings. However if you  invest in a storage virtualization controller which can provide thin provisioning for your existing storage investments and can non disruptively migrate your data from a fixed pool of storage to a thin provisioned pool of storage your costs will be lower and your utilization and performance will be increased.

When you look at new technologies to reduce your costs during these disruptive times, be sure that they can be implemented through a virtualization layer that provides data mobility, and can provide these technologies as a service to your existing investments. This time around don’t settle for ROI, the return on investment on a new technology product, look for an ROA, the return on an investment which makes your existing assets more efficient and productive.

A storage virtualization controller with Services Oriented storage solutions will help IT survive this current down turn and recover to new hieghts during the comings years.