Reducing Costs or Being More Efficient?
by Hu Yoshida on Apr 10, 2012
Last Friday the markets were closed, so much of the financial media spent the day talking to analysts to get their views on the recovery, such as it is. One of the top stories in the US was around the job market slowdown in March, which had the lowest increase since October.
One analyst noted that there were some layoffs as companies tried to reduce costs, however he argues that reducing costs does not enable you to grow and create jobs unless it is tied to a strategy for increasing efficiency, which helps your business grow. 
In IT there is tremendous pressure to reduce costs as the volume of data and new applications continue to explode in the face of a slow recovery. It is tempting to go for the lowest acquisition cost to get immediate relief, particularly in the area of storage costs. If you take the view that storage is a commodity, then all storage is the same and you go for the lowest price.
We believe that storage is strategic and has an impact on the efficiency of the whole data center, including servers, hypervisors, networks, applications, facilities and operations. This impact increases as we see applications and hypervisors, like VMware, offload more functions to storage so that the applications can be more efficient.
Site recovery manager is a good example. VMware can manage site recovery all on its own, by sending the VM disks to another VMware server. But when this is done, the VM disks must be moved over the LAN/WAN, consuming network bandwidth and processor cycles, and the recovery time and recovery point will take hours. This may be fine for non-critical applications, but how much would this outage cost for critical ones?
If down time is important, then VMware can download the data movement to a storage system through the use of VAAI and let the storage system move the data at FC speeds without impact to the CPU cycles and LAN/WAN. There will be extra costs for the replication function in the storage and FC connection, but this may be less important than the recovery time for the application and in the end be more efficient.
David Merrill talks more about efficiencies rather than costs. Visit his archives on capacity efficiency here: http://blogs.hds.com/david/category/capacityefficiency
Or, for all other posts on maximizing storage and capacity efficiencies, check these out: http://blogs.hds.com/capacity-efficiency.php
