Storage Nation

A while back we did a storage assessment for a non HDS customer and showed him that his storage utilization was actually around 30% which is typical in most accounts. While that was not surprising to the operations people this was a surprise to the financial people who could not understand why 70% of their storage capacity, in this case, several hundred TBs, was not being utilized. Management was embarrassed and immediately fingers were being pointed at the storage architect and storage administrators, who in turn pointed to the application users who were asking for way more storage than they appeared to need.

I recently spoke to two storage analysts about the effect of server virtualization on storage resources. Both agreed that the effect of virtual machines will be to increase the I/O workload coming from the VM hardware platform by the number of VMs that are virtualized and that the resulting I/O would be very random.   They agreed that the increasing workload required a storage system that could scale up as well as scale out as I noted in my previous post on  Scale up or Scale out.  Their next question was about the need for cache when I/O loads are random, since random I/Os are unpredictable and do not benefit from cache prefetch or cache reuse.

Greg Schulz posted a very comprehensive set of predictions on his StorageIO blog. He not only covers what he expects to see in 2010 and 2011, but also trends that will be gaining ground in 2010 and trends that will not. There is a lot to agree with and a lot to disagree with, but overall it is well worth a read. As the title of the post indicates, many of the trends and predictions will be more of the same from 2009.

Happy NewYear and welcome to 2010! I wish you all a healthy and productive new year. While the economy seems to be getting better, budget planners are still very cautious and so we will continue to see a drive to consolidate to reduce cost and thin down the fat to be more agile. Therefore data center virtualization will be a top priority for 2010.  We have already seen the adoption of server virtualization platforms with more competitive offerings and faster more powerful processors and networks becoming mainstream. The next major step in data center consolidation will be in the consolidation of storage through thin provisioning.

On my last post on Chunk Size Matters, Vinod Subramaniam had the following comment: “I think all vendors are guilty of complicating issues to such an extent that end users are left poring through unnecessarily complicated documents.” He proposed a simple XYZ factor approach, where X is the efficiency for a given storage architecture without thin provisioning and Y is the efficiency of the architecture with thin provisioning divided by X. You can read his full comment in my preceding post. The Enterprise Strategy Group had done this test for us in early 2008 so I decided to post their results to show you our XY factor.