Go after the low hanging fruit first
Posted Wednesday, June 29, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
In the May issue of Storage Magazine, editor Rich Castagna published the results of a twice yearly survey TechTarget does concerning planned storage spending. This time around, there were 833 respondents with an average company size of $1.4B. According to the survey, disk capacity growth is starting to gain momentum again, which is a change from the last 2 surveys where it had stalled. Those surveyed this time around said they’d add an average of 43TB in 2011. Going the next level down, larger enterprises expect to add 94TB, midsized enterprises are at 43TB, and even small companies are looking at adding an additional 22TB of capacity.
That’s a lot of storage. Is it all necessary?
Disk is cheap, and just adding disk to deal with storage growth is probably the easiest short term way to address it. All the other approaches tend to require a lot more thought and probably some new processes – basically, changes that most prefer just not to deal with. The truth sometimes hurts, but the reality of this is that storage is expected to continue to grow at these rates for at least the next 5 years (according to IDC) and just throwing hardware at the problem at some point won’t be enough. Ultimately the administrators who manage storage are going to have to implement new processes that, while possibly already available today, are not being widely used. The question for you is: when does that happen for me?
You’re probably already thinking about how to address this problem, even if you’re not actually doing anything other than just buying more storage capacity in the near term. Your storage, energy, and administrative budgets are increasing along with your storage purchases. There are a lot of technology options – storage capacity optimization, storage tiering, archiving, data classification, storage quotas, storage virtualization, etc. - but what's the easiest thing to do?
I’d suggest you address the low hanging fruit first. If there are things you can implement that are simple, don’t require exotic hardware purchases, are transparent to end users, and don’t increase your administrative burden but have a real impact on how much storage you need by increasing your ability to utilize what you already own much more efficiently, that might be of interest.
What if you could install a software component in your hypervisor that would triple IOPS/spindle and decrease storage capacity consumption by over 70%? What if this component worked not only on Hyper-V, but also on ESX and XenServer, and allowed for storage to be moved between hypervisors without having to import any data? With it, you speed up your existing storage while at the same leveraging thin provisioning, providing very scalable snapshot technology (we’re talking tens of thousands of snapshots), fully supporting VM migration (Live Migration, vMotion, XenMotion), and getting a few other goodies you’ll find out about if you delve more deeply into what Virsto Software offers.
If you’re a large enterprise, instead of buying 94TB this year, you might only have to buy 28TB, and you’ll also spend less on rack space, energy, backup, and administration. If you’re paying $10/GB for your storage (well within the range of enterprise-class storage), you’d save well over $600K on storage this year. And other than installing and initially configuring it, you wouldn’t have to do anything differently from what you’re doing now. It’s simple, doesn’t require any hardware purchases, is fully transparent to applications and end users, and actually reduces your administrative burden while improving storage performance and storage utilization.
If you’re using virtual computing in your infrastructure and this sounds interesting to you, I’d invite you to check us out at www.virsto.com.
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