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…
Thursday, November 15, 2007 8:15:19 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Observations

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.

Thursday, June 07, 2007 9:48:51 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management

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?

Thursday, May 24, 2007 10:14:04 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management

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.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007 10:02:34 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [2]  News

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.

 

Thursday, April 12, 2007 11:40:04 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Storage Management

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!

 

Tuesday, April 03, 2007 4:01:02 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  News | Storage Management

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.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006 11:52:50 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management | Storage Management

Santayana's Rule

What was it he said? Ah, yes... “Those who refuse to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.” Let's look at some history. IBM created a PC with a proprietary architecture. Others created an IBM-compatible PC that was an open platform. Which one is around today? Apple created a brilliant PC device with a closed architecture and a proprietary operating system. Microsoft created an open OS platform and actively recruited developers. Which one owns the market today?

It has been clear for years (going back to the heyday of IBM) that an open platform and the courting of third-party developers wins the market. In the end, the third parties taken together have more money, get to market quicker and have more ideas than any one company could possibly have, regardless of how rich they happen to be.

Network Appliance and EMC are battling tooth and nail to dominate the storage market. Why then do they both have closed platforms and shun third-party developers? (The one exception being the Centera folks, who seem to have the right perspective.) It certainly seems to me that neither EMC nor NetApp live in a world where Santayana's Rule fails to apply. My bet is that the first of these guys who figures out that if their hardware and infrastructure underly every third-party storage application, and they actually support ISVs, they will rule the Industry. What are they waiting for... someone else to create an open platform and take the market away from them? NIH (not invented here) never wins. It has been tested for years with the same result every time.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006 9:29:47 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Backa's Laws | Management | Storage Management

Paradigm Shift #1

As the demand for storage grows and technology progresses, the economics of owning storage change. Not all that long ago we wanted to write as much as we could to tape, because tape was cheap and on-line storage was expensive. Now many people think that on-line storage is infinite (almost) and free (not at all, but we'll talk more about this later). In today's economics, storing your data on tape is one of the most expensive things you can do. As a result, many of the people I talk to have abandoned tape altogether for on-line archives. Not only are the on-line archives cheaper, but they are more flexible and much easier to search. But this doesn't mean you can manage them like tape...

With tape the deal was write it and forget it. Tapes in a mountain somewhere generally receive no maintenance (not that this is the right thing to do). On-line storage, on the other hand, needs maintenance. As you write more, you need to provision more. And if you don't organize it well, as you write more, specific things become harder and harder to find.

The bottom line is that this is a real paradigm shift. It is not as simple as substituting a disc for a tape. You have to manage differently as well. It's time to change your thinking as well as your media...

Friday, October 13, 2006 6:18:50 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Storage Management

DIstinguishing between health and risk

Storage is just bits on a disk, right? What's complicated about this? A lot. Storage is a surprisingly complex thing to manage.

I tell you that a volume is 95% full. What does this mean? I tell you that another volume is 70% full. What does this mean? Maybe not what you think...

A volume that is 95% full is unhealthy. There is no getting around this. The algorithms that allocate space on volumes start breaking down after 85% of the space is taken. Fragmentation begins to increase dramatically, and there is not enough free space to reorg the data in place. In other words, the volume is unhealthy. The reaction of most people to this situation is to say that this volume demands immediate attention. Seeing only 5% free space, many a wise storage manager would declare an emergency.

But suppose I also tell you that the volume's size has been stable over time. It neither grows nor shrinks by more than 1%. Now there is no immediate emergency. The volume in question is unhealthy, but not very risky. Should you apply your efforts here, or do something else?

Our other volume is 70% full. At 70%, we know this volume is healthy. But now suppose I tell you that the space used is growing by 10% to 15% a month... This volume is certain to run to be completely out of space in less than 3 months. Sounds pretty risky to me. I might put my attention here and let the other volume slide for a while.

The point of the story is that things - storage management in particular - are rarely one-dimensional. If your model for storage management is over simplified, you might make serious mistakes, or you might be constantly chasing your tail never knowing what is truly important. As you plan to manage your storage cost-effectively, you need more information than just performance and free space. If all you know is performance and free space, your only solution to any issue is add more hardware. Hardware vendors love this solution, but your senior management doesn't. Nor should you.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006 9:52:14 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Storage Management