“Stop buying storage. You heard me right: Stop buying storage,” Salem said. “How? Reduce the amount of information that you store in the first place, and make the storage you do have more flexible and efficient.”
I read this and thought “Wow – here is a guy that may actually understand the value of maintenance and storage management. “
Other things mentioned in article:
If you want to stop buying storage, Salem said, there are four key opportunities that everyone should be looking at right now: storage resource management, thin provisioning, data deduplication and intelligent archiving.
“If you’re like most companies,” Salem said, “you have a lot of ‘orphan storage.’ It’s time to give your orphan storage a loving family. You often have more room to grow than you realize.”
“Most enterprise data centers utilize only about 15 to 35 percent of the entire storage capacity available. The remainder is used for unexpected overhead, locked out of accessibility, intentionally kept for some other purpose or simply lost track of over time.”
All of it requires spinning disks and electricity from the grid that costs money on the bottom line, whether or not the storage is in service.
“We had one customer who told us that they were managing massive information growth. They estimated they were using 50 percent of their storage. We showed them they were only using 20 percent,” Salem said.
“What you need are storage management solutions that work across different platforms and give you an end-to-end view of the storage you have, the storage you’re using and the storage you’re not.
Storage efficiency is a concept that is often lost in the marketplace of ideas because so many people and experts define efficiency in so many varied ways. It is not just electricity usage, maintenance, square footage, information density or response time that defines storage efficiency it is all of them and viewed from different perspectives depending on the application using the storage resource.
If one solution fit all situations we would be all driving the same cars and all our houses would look the same. And there would be no innovation at all. When things get hard, it is a good time to look at your storage infrastructure and rediscover the inefficiencies, and concentrate on solving those bottlenecks. Actually, now is a good time to review all of your infrastructure costs.
By the way, I hope you can join us at EMCworld this year in Orlando May 18 – 21.
