Storage Economics: When Data Meets Dough
If you think storage is cheap, you aren’t doing your sums right. The big picture, with power, carbon, and legal costs, adds up to a new discipline, says Hitachi Data Systems’ David Merrill – a storage economist
Terabytes per tonne of CO2
“One metric that’s popular with software companies at the moment is terabytes per metric tonne of carbon. And customers that are laying off staff are probably more sensitive to the costs of labour.” But he added: “The conversation needs to go beyond the data centre, to include procurement and the guys who pay the power bill and the legal, software and hardware maintenance bills.” Instead of the traditional, siloed approach to storage acquisition and management, Merrill urged that it needs to be considered in TCO terms that also include end-of-life costs.
“If you’re extremely sensitive to labour costs, consider your storage infrastructure in terms of what capacity one person is able to manage,” he advised. “Or look at it in terms of the most terabytes you can afford to manage per square metre, for example. Then you can start to look for technologies to fit these requirements. We can do one-to-one mapping of technologies that reduce these costs, like spinning down discs, or auto-provisioning, for example. And the economies offered by the tri-factor of virtualisation, thinning and tiering are a very powerful combination done in concert with good engineering practice.”
“You have to be able to view disk space as a monetary concept. For example, solid state is a fairly new development. But should it be on your radar?” Merrill asked. “It all depends on your cost parameters.” And these have undergone radical change in reaction to the recent global economic turmoil.
The goal: Stop buying disks?
The current global economic condition had certainly made this message resonate more loudly among finance and IT directors, Merrill said. And HDS recently launched a Storage Economics methodology, a series of tools and services to help minimise capital and operational expenditure across businesses’ storage environment.
“The key message of storage economics nowadays is to learn to live off your body fat, as it were. You may be running out of data centre space. Fine, stop buying disks and better use what you’ve already got, because you’re already cooling and powering it, as well as having it depreciate on you. Remember that reclamation is not free – but given nine to 18 months, it’s possible to save 30 to 40 per cent on storage costs.”
