Gartner: Storage Should Get To Basics

“Unused software is easy money for vendors – there is no service and no support required,” he says. “The savings we make from throwing out unused products can be reinvested.” Companies should do this every quarter, he believes.

“Go through your bills and see if you are using items or not,” he says. “If something cost a million pounds and you only use it once a year, chances are you can change things.”

Other things to look for are obsolete utilities. Five years ago, conversion software, or a faster copy command might have been worth paying for. Now those functions might have been commoditised and built into the standard programs: “Chances are you don’t have to pay for them any more.”

“When you retire an application, remember to kick out the odds and ends attached to it,” he suggests.

Storage devices may have come with bundled software that was useful at the time, such as the ability to take snapshots of Informix databases, or handle Windows 95 disk images. “If you’re not using them, stop paying those licence fees,” says Filks.

Your company’s IT history, and any recent mergers may have left you with duplicate technology, for instance more than one back-up and restore product, or have some that aren’t needed: “Perhaps you once needed separate products for Windows, Linux and Unix. Now the top few products are strong in all areas.”

Higher utilisation

Another part of the spring cleaning should be boosting your utilisation. If your storage is less than 70 percent utilised, you can increase that, and save money, says Filks.

Application developers writing a program always ask for a lot of storage, he says. When asked how much data they need, they say “don’t be stupid, we haven’t written the application yet”. That’s fair enough, but they say the same thing when the application is delivered, he says: “That is wrong. A logistics manager knows how many new trucks will be required if a promotion takes off and sells ten percent more bottles of wine. Storage guys know how much more disk storage they need of they increase the size of the database by ten percent.”

You also have to make sure applications are using the right storage. “You map business critical applications to high availability servers – but do you also map them onto your most high available storage?”

For example, ATM cashpoints need a lot of reliability, but print servers can use lower-cost storage. To map data to the wrong kind of storage either means wasting money on something that is over-specified , or else taking a risk that a critical application may fail through using lower-grade storage.