Marc 'StorageRap' Farley talks about the Elephant in the data centre and it being storage utilisation! And he's right, it's a big Bull elephant sitting in the middle of a lot data centres; trumpeting loudly. But I'm not sure it's the only one.
Defaulting everything onto Networked Storage? Nothing wrong with Networked Storage but does everything have to go on it? It's an expensive option, don't discount locally attached/infernal disk.
Storage Software Licensing? Only need 2 Terabytes of Snap? Got a large array; well unfortunately you need to license the lot.
You can only use half of the disk you paid for, not because of over-allocation but because you've topped out the performance of the spindles. And re-organising them is a right royal pain.
8 Gig FC, you probably don't need it. Look at your SAN utilisation figures, you could probably stick with your old Brocade/Cisco/McData switches for a long time before you top them out.
It comes down to a couple of things
- Only pay for what you use
- Use what you pay for
EDIT: Thanks for pointing out the typo in the first Marc but I meant the second wording. It kind of plays into your hands; over allocation etc means that you pay for capacity you can't use.
Thin provisioning is only half the story and yes Marc, I know that 3Par do a pretty good job of telling the rest of the story. This is going to be the year where we look at what we do, why we do and how much we pay for it.
Thanks, Sto-bod. I’ve been reading your posts, which got me thinking about a wide range of storage services.
2009 is going to be the year when people break out of their comfort zones where storage is concerned simply because they don’t have the money to buy things. Some of that will be increased use of thin technologies – including de-dupe. Some of it will be converting capital expenses to operating expenses through storage service offerings. Some will be using smaller, less expensive systems that have acquired the capabilities that were only available in enterprise gear a couple years ago. The scalability of the smaller systems then becomes the key. I don’t want to sound too much like a 3PAR heretic here but I think the scaling performance of wide striping in 3PAR and XIV systems might be more relevant to some customers than thin provisioning.
People can’t afford to “buy big”, if they can afford anything at all.