Lots and lots of discussion in the blogosphere about storage efficiency; lots of guarantees, lots of rocks been thrown and general fun (or fud) for all. And then as the poor end-user, you scratch your head wondering what it all means and then of course, there is the thorny issue of infernal charge-back which causes storage managers eternal headaches unless you work with data which will not compress/dedupe 🙂
It's time to change; it's time to stop guarantees which will promise me to be 50% more efficient than now; it's time to move to a model where I only pay for the data I store and the I/Os my servers consume. Of course, it now becomes a real incentive to store my data on as little physical storage as possible; the less tin you provision, the more you make.
Obviously, the first thing to do is produce a really good SRM tool which builds up a picture of my current data useage and how much I/O; this will be part of the RFP process and yet even more obviously will be carried out gratis. You can then bid for replacing the current estate, including migration costs and also a fixed price for increase in I/O and data stored.
As part of the bid, you will also include a cost for the environmentals; if your infrastructure costs more than that to run, you pay the delta and if it costs less than that to run, you keep the delta.
I'm sure some of my friends in user-land can add to the list.
No money-back guarantees, just guaranteed pricing…
StorageBod, how do you do it? – This is an amazing post and an excellent concept. Let’s say a vendor goes through this for you, which would be a large amount of work – are you prepared to make a purchase/replacement decision?
In a nutshell, you are saying “Guarantee me a cost of ownership model. If you do better, you keep the difference and if you can’t deliver on it, you make up the difference.”
This is probably what Ianhf was really asking for in his GrumpyStorage blog a couple weeks ago. http://www.grumpystorage.com/2010/02/tco-why-is-it-so-hard-for-some.html
Why bother posturing and making platitudes if you can make TCO your business model? Brilliant!
The point of 3PAR’s capacity guarantee program is to have serious TCO discussions with customers. The most difficult thing we have to do at 3PAR is to get people to understand that our systems and technology are much more efficient. TCO pricing would do that.