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Does Anyone Care About Efficiency Of Storage?
Submitted by Servaas Schrama on May 29th, 2008
Years ago, everybody thought that IT was about computers with an internal disk running an operating system, and tapedrives to store corporate data. And look where we are now. An evolution in the way we use storage space has already taken place.
Where hard disk space used to grow enormously internally in computers, that has come to a halt, and external storage has taken part of its place. All kinds of people walk around with USB drives, and NAS has become a regular term like spaghetti and cheese.
The corporate world has also seen an evolution. It went from tapedrives to network attached disks, and now to storage solutions, where you don’t even speak of disks anymore, as the total amount of storage space is enormous, and space just gets added to servers in need. Although the servers believe to see disks, they do not. So where is this all going?
Recently someone said that the exploding use of storage space can be reduced by 20% if you teach users how to delete stuff they don’t need. As the cost went down, we all started using more and more. The big question is “Is this better than before? Are we working more efficiently?”. Not necessarily. As independent consultant, I see that most of the big companies out there have no clue how to manage the storage space and make good use of it, but merely see it as a place to pile up documents. But how do you find the data you need efficiently?
In other words, now that we have the storage we always wished for at a good price, we don’t even bother using it efficiently, we just waste it without caring. So what have we gained?
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May 30th, 2008 at 9:51 am
The real problem is you’re looking at this from the seller side (IT) of the equation. The buyer’s side - the users - have a much different perception of storage.
Regardless of the true cost of storage to the IT department, the users perception, based on what they can stuff into their own PC from the local computer store, is that storage runs less than $500/TB. At that price, it’s much cheaper for the user to just use more than it is to “be efficient”.
The cost (time) of spending time to “delete stuff they don’t need” is quite large.
And, of course, many employees are marginally aware of things like SoX and are laboring under the potential misunderstanding that they have to save absolutely everything.
So the partial answer to your question “Does Anyone Care About Efficiency Of Storage?” is that end users do not.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:25 am
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May 31st, 2008 at 12:17 pm
An interesting idea here. I do think we’ve gained in the core value of providing extremely cheap storage, but agree this is at a cost of poorer organization of data. Solution is better mapping so that the “low value” data can be effectively archived without human intervention.