The Fastest Way to Save Money on Storage

The speed and depth of the economy’s decline has taken a lot of people by surprise, me included. Today it’s clear that the Storage Industry is no longer immune to reductions in IT spending. While we all still have to keep our businesses running, we also need to cut expenses and cut them now.

 

Storage, however, remains one of the most expensive aspects of most people’s networks and the end-users’ requirements continue to increase. We need our users to be doing new business every day. This means we’re telling them to create and save new business objects every day. So how do we control this expense? And how do we do it now!

 

While Harry Potter can just waive his magic wand, the rest of us cannot. Nevertheless, here are some easy to implement techniques that will do the job – and get it done now!

 

Block all non-business content. There are numerous ways to create file blocking policies depending on your storage infrastructure. The first and easiest step in reducing costs is to stop treating storage as though it were infinite and free.

 

Set reasonable limits on personal space. There are very few jobs that require the creation of mountains of content. Normally when someone has a large home directory it’s because they never take the time to clean up, or they’re filling it with non-business content. Again, depending on your storage platform, there are a variety straight-forward ways to set limits.

 

Analyze what’s out there. Unfortunately, there are no easy ways to do this. You will ultimately need find the right application and probably buy a license for it. But a terabyte of storage at today’s prices costs $47,000 a year to own and maintain. Compared to this price, the cost of analysis software is quite modest. For the customers that we work with, their one-year ROI is normally 3 to 5 times the license cost. (Providing, of course, they act on the information the application gives them.)

 

Everything here can be done on any storage platform. And all of it should have a positive one-year return whether your investment is in staff costs or applications. There is no reason why you cannot make a meaningful reduction in your storage costs this year. None. To quote Nike, “Just do it!”

Wednesday, May 06, 2009 1:19:34 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Observations | Storage Management

A Job Offer You Should Refuse

Over the years a fair number of people have asked my opinion about the job offers they have received. I am happy to say that most of these offers were quite good. In fact, a couple of times I was jealous…

 

But if I were offered the job of most of the storage managers and CSOs (Chief Storage Officers) I meet, I would refuse. Not because being an infrastructure manager is a thankless job – which it is. Most jobs are characterized by more criticism than praise. The issue for me is that I won’t take a job where I am held responsible for delivering non-stop, high-quality service while, at the same time, I have no control over the consumption of the resources, and little or no insight about how they are being used.

 

What am I talking about?

 

Only a few of the storage mangers I meet have any policies describing the appropriate consumption of corporate storage resources. In fact, their users are free to do pretty much anything they please. The majority of these storage managers also lack a system management application that they can use to control the consumption of their storage, nor do they have anything that tells them how the existing resources are being consumed.

 

Even worse, a surprising number of these people are reluctant to set firm policies governing resource consumption. They live in fear of their end-users.

 

As an entrepreneur, I’m used to taking risks. But in a successful company, these are controlled risks. I never write blank checks. Why would I want to be responsible in a situation where any one of my users could create a service outage…? And where it’s even somewhat likely that a naïve user will do so by accident one day.

 

Doing a great job – in storage management or anything else – requires having the right tools for the job. A carpenter without a hammer and a saw is very limited in what he can do. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you don’t have the tools to succeed. Infrastructure management is hard enough even when you have what you need.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009 11:07:28 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management | Observations | Storage Management

The Easiest Way to Save Money on Storage

In the world at large, there is a saying that goes: “Often, the old ways are the best ways.” When it comes to managing storage, this can be equally true.

 

While I don’t often admit it, I am old enough to have worked on and managed mainframes – in a world before networked storage existed. In those days users had limits on the amount of resources they could tie up, and most companies allocated the cost of the users’ consumption back to the department they worked for.

 

With the advent of PC networks and networked storage, most companies stopped charging users for resource consumption. What happens when you make a valuable resource free to the consumer..? Usage soars. Analysts such as Gartner Group tell us that 20 to 40 percent of what’s stored on most networks is junk – it has no value to the business at all. Why is it there? Because the resource has no limits and consumption is free.

 

NTP Software has one of the very few storage billing applications available today. Our informal statistics on the net result of going from free to a fair-cost model is that consumption is reduced 10 to 20 percent almost over night and that growth rates are cut in half. When consumers understand that there is a cost associated with their actions, they moderate their behavior.

 

And... you don’t even need to bill people. Simply publishing the list of the top 25 or top 100 users has a similar effect. For many people, how others perceive them – in this case as resource hogs – is as valuable as cash.

 

Some times the old ways really are the best ways – even in high-tech.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009 3:18:23 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management | Observations

A Breakthrough Technology

Every once in a while there is a breakthrough in technology that changes the character of an established paradigm. One such breakthrough has just occurred in the area of file archiving – On-demand Archiving™. On-demand Archiving dramatically increases the ROI on file system archiving by completely eliminating the need for repetitive file systems scans. 

In lieu of system-wide scans, On-demand Archiving uses events to trigger the archiving process, for example, the crossing of a threshold on user home directories. As the end-user reaches certain levels of consumption, the archiving engine is automatically engaged and moves targeted files to secondary storage. This limits the consumption of primary storage and provides for continuous, high-quality service while reducing cost.

In addition, On-demand Archiving can engage the end-user directly and allow them to choose the files that are archived based on their business value and on-going relevance. Preliminary research has shown that when users are engaged in the process of choosing the disposition of their data they are more prone to delete unnecessary files. This further reduces demand and cost.

To learn more see: http://www.ntpsoftware.com/products/ODA

Saturday, March 21, 2009 3:31:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  News

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.

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

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