Selling less storage is not bad
by Hu Yoshida on June 11, 2009
Beth Pariseau posted a comment about IDC’s recent report on the drop off in external storage revenue in the 1st quarter of 2009. IDC reported that 1st quarter revenues for external storage declined by $5.6 B, or 18.2 %. It was noted by Beth that all but two of the top five major vendors, Dell and Hitachi, reported double digit declines. While Hitachi did report a loss, HDS realized a 1% gain year over year when measured in constant currency.The drop in revenues was contrasted with a 14.8% growth in capacity. “These contrasting results are due to a combination of currency implications, lower overall sales, shifts in product mix, and aggressive pricing actions’ according to Steve Scully, research manager, enterprise storage, as quoted in Beth’s post.
These results were not surprising to HDS since we have been advising our customers to do more with less. Since the introduction of the Universal Storage Platform, we have been advising our customers to increase the utilization of their existing storage assets through the use of storage virtualization. We have developed tools and methodologies around storage economics to help quantify the savings that can be gained through storage virtualization, Dynamic Provisioning, and tiered storage. With an average storage utilization of 30 to 40%, there is plenty of room to grow without buying a lot of new capacity. Not only does this reduce capital expenditures, it also reduces operational costs, through simplification of provisioning, migration, and load balancing tasks.
While these tools can help save costs during the current downturn, they also provide customers with the agility to scale up when the economic recovery kicks in. Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning will enable the seamless provisioning of new storage capacity and functionality without disruption to existing applications. Those who hunker down during this down turn, by shifting to lower cost, lower function storage, and micro managing their utilization will not have the ability to respond quickly to increased business demands.
With the USP V/VM you can put most of your storage capacity on lower cost commodity systems without sacrificing agility and enterprise functionality by virtualizing behind the USP V/VM. Increasing utilization and decreasing the purchase of storage is not bad, as long as you do not give up the capability to quickly scale up when the business requirement change. Selling less storage through the application of storage virtualization, tiered storage, and dynamic provisioning, helps our customers to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency so that they will be better positioned to grow with the coming recovery.
