Microsoft Sneaks Out A Winner

If Microsoft made a big announcement for the release of Windows Home Server, I certainly missed it. But it looks like Microsoft has created a winner. Windows Home Server will hold all of your files, automatically backup your home workstations, stream your audio and video, and act as a remote gateway into your home network – allowing you to access both the server and your workstations from outside the house. What more could anyone want?

 

Today you can buy a fast terabyte hard drive for $1,000 or less and gigabyte drives for a few hundred dollars. Using Windows Home Server you can create a home network whose capacity and features rival many corporate networks.

 

I don’t know what it says about me that I have a 5 terabyte network at my house or that I expect to need more storage in a couple of years, but I definitely enjoy having continuous online access to everything that I have from pretty much everywhere in the world.

3/11/2008 1:52:10 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [3]  News | Observations

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The mystery of the missing bits in Europe

A couple of years ago i became sensitive to the fact that European companies seem to have dramatically less storage on their networks - in general, and per employee or per revenue dollar - than North American companies. Where are the missing bits? How can a multi-national, headquartered in Europe, run its business with a small fraction of the information its North American competitors need to run their business? If anyone has an answer, I would love to hear it. The difference (from my unscientific survey) is enormous – generally a factor of 10. If a North American bank has a petabyte, its European equal has only 100 terabytes, often less. Surely 90% of the bits in North America are not junk… So far the only material difference I can find in business practices is that while companies on both sides of the pond are treating compliance (other than PCI) quite lightly, many of the European companies I speak with are doing almost nothing. Since a lot of the compliance legislation ultimately translates to ‘you can’t delete anything’, this may account for some of the difference, but certainly not all of it. Stay tuned, the investigation continues…
11/15/2007 8:15:19 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Observations | Storage Mangement

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Keep your eye on the money

Most of today's talk about storage is 'techie talk'. Rarely do we hear about (human, customer) management issues. In a world of a thousand details, it's easy to lose track of the forest. Sometimes we have to remember to step back and look at the big picture.

In the world of storage, along with death and taxes,  there are some givens: hardware prices go down, salaries go up. Only a few years ago the TCO for storage was 4 to 5 times its acquisiton cost. Today it is 6 to 7 times. Why? Hardware costs go down (acquisition) and salaries go up (TCO is really the cost of keeping what you've bought). How many people are talking about reducing the human costs of providing a first-class storage utility for your customers? Not many.

Today in North America there is a well established paradigm for managing the human costs of providing first class service to your customers - self-service. Give your customers what they want, when they want it, 24x7x365 by letting them serve themselves, getting what they need when they need it. Storage resources can be self-service too. The technology exists to let your users provision themselves (with the guidelines you have established), use work flow to get authorization for the expense and ask for appropriate exceptions to policy. Self-service storage is self-managing storage. Self-managing storage lets you and your team move on to deal with more important matters.

Who wouldn't want to provide their users with better service while lowering their operating costs? I sure would.

6/7/2007 9:48:51 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management | Storage Mangement

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The value of allocating costs

Most IT departments supply resources – including their most costly resource, storage – at no charge to everyone. We all need to realize that under these circumstances the optimum strategy for each user is to consume as much storage as possible. Any time using or abusing storage can save the user even a minute’s time or help in any way, why wouldn’t they take advantage of a resource that comes at no cost to them whatsoever?

 

However, once storage has a fair price, then it becomes to the users’ advantage to treat it with the respect it deserves. The average result of moving from ‘free’ to fairly priced is clear: consumption drops about 20% in an instant, and the growth in demand is cut in half. How can this be? Gartner Group told us long ago that, on average, 20% to 40% of the stuff on most company’s networks is junk. Once there is cost for keeping junk around, most people get rid of it. Once you make the decision not to put junk on the network, your demand for additional storage decreases.

 

Many companies are reluctant to charge for storage. Sometimes it’s a matter of management will, other times their financial systems are not set up for cost allocation, or their finance department doesn’t have the resources to do the work. One thing most people don’t realize is that there is both hard billing and soft billing.

 

Hard billing is what you would assume it to be. The charges are real and someone has to pay, either with internal funds or in cash. As explained above, implementing hard billing is well worth the price.

 

However, soft billing – generating the bills, circulating them appropriately, but not requiring payment – can be equally effective. How? Human psychology. Humans are acutely sensitive to being watched. The mere fact that they know someone cares or someone is watching changes their behavior. Knowing that someone is watching the costs you generate is no different than knowing you will be watched in any other aspect of your life. You alter your behavior to ensure that people see you only when you are acting appropriately. Since there is no way to ‘hide’ from a billing system, storage users start acting appropriately all the time.

 

The bottom line: implementing a system that can generate bills for storage that are distributed to your users even thought payment is not required has nearly the same effect as actually collecting the money. Namely, consumption drops immediately, and the growth rate is cut substantially. Well worth the effort, wouldn’t you say?

5/24/2007 10:14:04 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management | Storage Mangement

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Beware of Vista

Often the lesson is: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Many of us were not looking for a new Microsoft Operating system – I certainly wasn’t. But Vista is here. However, Microsoft has changed its implementation of the CIFS protocol. Vista is incompatible with all of the third-party NASes that we have tested against, from NetGear home systems to NetApp Filers.

I can’t imagine why Microsoft would do such a thing, but a lot of people who were open to Vista have since rolled back rather than change all their NASes. As of this writing, (April 2007), I have no information from Microsoft or any of the NAS vendors concerning a solution to this problem or a timeframe for releasing one.

Amazing! I suggest we all boycott Microsoft.

5/1/2007 10:02:34 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [5]  News | Storage Mangement

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This year's themes

Industries and technologies move in synchronous waves. We all experience the same macro-economic cycles, and each of us can only buy what is currently offered for sale. This means that at any given time most companies are in the same place relative to issues in technology. As a result, various periods in time have 'themes' that focus everyone's attention.

 

This year would seem to have two themes: data security and controlling spending - tough themes to have at the same time since security costs money and generally has no direct benefits to the end users. Even worse, a recent Gartner Group study reported that most IT shops are already under funded this year in the area of storage. This year we have to do a whole lot more with less. The only way to do this is to move quickly and use a two-phase solution. You have to generate an immediate savings that can be used to establish an infrastructure that gives you an on-going reduction in cost.

 

There are several ways you can take control of your environment and quickly achieve a one-time savings that can be applied to establish the infrastructure that allows for perpetual cost reductions. For example, automatic policy-based removal or migration of data is easy to implement and will give you an immediate break in spending. Follow this with the creation of a self-service environment and permanently reduce your on-going operating costs.

 

The challenge is to be able to move fast enough in building your infrastructure that you don't get caught by being under-funded. Those who can get it done in time will be the heroes of the next two years.

 

4/12/2007 11:40:04 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Storage Mangement

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Beware of Microsoft Vista

Often the lesson is: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Many of us were not looking for a new Microsoft Operating system – I certainly wasn’t. But Vista is here. However, Vista is incompatible with all of the third-party NASes that we have tested against, from NetGear home systems to NetApp Filers.

I can’t imagine why Microsoft would do such a thing, but a lot of people who were open to Vista have since rolled back rather than change all their NASes. As of this writing, (April 2007), I have no information from Microsoft or any of the NAS vendors concerning a solution to this problem or a timeframe for releasing one.

Amazing!

 

4/3/2007 4:01:02 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  News | Storage Mangement

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Compliance? What compliance?

Last year Compliance was everyone's hot topic. It's a year later, the noise has died down, does this mean the problem is solved? Not hardly.

We spend most of our days talking to large companies about their storage issues and strategies. Over the course of time, the subject of Compliance generally comes up. What's been done over the last year? Not much. Want to know why? There are at least two reasons for what appears to be a lack of interest in addressing compliance issues - other than in the Banking community, of course.

The first and most important issue is the lack of organization in most people's data. The mere task of figuring out where all the stuff that's supposed to subject to compliance actually is becomes a daunting task in and of itself.

The second issue is what you might expect - cost. Once you find the data you need, you have to rearchitect your systems to bring your handling of the data into compliance. And this expense gives no value to the user community. It is pure cost. If you were in charge, where would you spend your time and money? Not here.

As time goes on and systems get rebuilt, companies will come closer and closer to being in compliance. But today the average company isn't even close.

11/1/2006 11:52:50 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [397]  Management | Storage Mangement

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