Storage Nation

Andy Kyte from Gartner was been sounding the alarm for data center modernization for a number of years. He warns that the data center is headed for a train wreck

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.

Hitachi Data Systems has been very successful selling the benefits of Storage Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning.

While Cloud computing is touted as a new way to mask the complexity of the IT infrastructure and provide IT services as “a pay as you grow” service, these concepts  were introduced over 10 years ago with the service providers of the late 1990’s. These concepts were so appealing that they helped to fuel the dot com boom,  but disappeared in the dot com crash of 2001/2002. What has changed to make us think that a shared services model like cloud computing and cloud storage will be successful this time around? Key to the success of cloud storage providers, as with the dot com storage services providers (SSP) of earlier days, will be the ability to leverage their resources and be more efficient in managing the growth of storage compared to their end users.

On my previous post, which was titled, I Agree With Chuck on Data Dedupe” I received a fair number of comments. Some were from Jered Floyd of Permabit and even one from Steve Duplessie . My post was intended to point out that while dedupe was an excellent tool for reducing storage bloat, it was addressing the symptom and not the cause which was stale data and over allocation at the source. Unfortunately this post was interpreted as supporting Chuck Hollis’ view on dedupe of primary data.

There has been a lot of discussion around tiered storage after my last blog on that subject.   Stephen Foskett and Carter George have posted, suggesting different approaches to tiered storage

Tiered Storage is one of the best ways to reduce storage costs if it can be done dynamically.

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.

Kevin Eggelston, the Senior VP and General Manager of the Asia Pacific Region for HDS, is one of the keynote speakers for the series of User Conferences that are underway in this region.