Since all the cool companies are offering capacity guarantees these days, I thought I might as well throw my hat into the ring and offer one, too. Starting now, I guarantee any takers an easy plan to write 50% more production data to your existing storage environment. Even better, I’ll do it with no additional hardware or software to purchase and install and no complicated terms and conditions. You won’t even have to delete anything, but if you do I’ll guarantee double your data! And I’ll only charge 50% of the deferred storage hardware and software spend, and if I can’t do it you pay nothing. What have you got to lose?
You’re Holding It Wrong
How can I make this fantastic offer without knowing anything about your environment and without including any asterisks? Simply because when it comes to data storage, in the immortal words of Steve Jobs, you’re holding it wrong. In 15 years of enterprise storage consulting, I have never seen a single environment using anything close to their total usable capacity. In fact, I’ve never seen an environment that was using even half of its usable capacity.
This makes my job easy. If you have a half dozen storage arrays with a total of 500 TB of raw storage, about 60% of that capacity will be usable (once you take RAID, spares, and other overhead into account). Of the remaining 300 TB of capacity, you’re probably only storing 70 TB of data if you’re like the average enterprise shop. So I can just hand you a report that says “write 35 TB more” and walk out. My job will be done.
But let’s say you’re better than average. Let’s say you run a really tight ship and don’t waste expensive capacity like most people. I bet you’ve still got slack capacity you don’t know about. Maybe a project manager demanded a 30 TB LUN for his new database and won’t let you run your monitoring tools to see what he’s really using. Or perhaps another project never got off the ground but they won’t share the disk space “they paid for.” Then there is that other system that was turned off without you knowing, so the storage is still allocated. There’s always plenty of perfectly-good free usable primary storage capacity.
Wringing Out the Slack
See my post, Use Process Solutions For Process Problems, Technical Solutions For Technical Ones
Despite what the warring vendors might say, the issue isn’t the equipment or software you’re using, the issue is the way you’re using it. Storage isn’t bought as an integrated piece of a compute environment these days, and it isn’t managed that way, either. Enterprise storage arrays are purchased in fits and starts, a little here and a lot there, according to the whims of the budget and project planning process. It’s not at all unusual to see tight storage constraints delaying projects even as a new and totally unused array sits idle in the corner.
The root cause lies with how capacity is purchased, configured, allocated, and charged to projects, not with the technical capabilities of the platform. Nearly every modern array can be shared by many servers, and nearly every environment has ample storage networking potential. Are Fibre Channel directors and HBAs to expensive? Switch to iSCSI or NAS! Every server has a spare gigabit Ethernet port or two, and I bet your networking guys have a decent switch you could use.
All this applies mainly to primary storage, but backups are an equal opportunity. Most daily incremental backup tapes are left half-empty due to job scheduling, connectivity, and inappropriate manual media assignments. And those jam-packed weekly full tapes are probably a waste of time and capacity, too. How about re-thinking your backup process with fewer fulls, virtual tape, elimination of useless data, or even snapshots? I bet my friend W. Curtis Preston could offer some great advice there!
Stephen’s Stance
You don’t need to get crazy to wring out a bit more storage capacity. Deduplication and data optimization sound great, but what’s the point if you’ve got ample unused capacity already? Aren’t all these guarantees just an attempt to grab more business, more money, and sell more gear?
The leading cause of poor storage capacity utilization is failure to use storage capacity!
I’m serious about the offer. I’ve done exactly this kind of work before and have the resources to do it for you, too. Bring me in and I’ll give you a plan to write 50% more primary data. Guaranteed success or you don’t pay. But I bet you could do the same thing without me!
giggle, love the article Stephen! I’m fortunate to have actually met some of the folks in the world (1 or 2 environments over my thousands of projects over the years) where they ACTUALLY used their space and were very accountable to it (Which means.. trying to squeeze blood from a stone wasn’t so easy – They didn’t even thick provision their databases.. they actually had content! (it was amazing and devastating all in the same breath! reminds of of the days of hardcore DAS.. err.. :))
I also find interesting how your writing style in this particular post, sort of looks like Robyn’s writing style a bit.. That’s not a positive or a negative.. just an observation (refute as desired :))
But, not to be a corporate shill (because I’m not ;)) and I definitely see the point you’re making (I also make that same point.. for some reason I’m always trying to get people to use what they own correctly instead of buying senselessly) In the whole of the ‘my guarantee is better than your guarantee’, I stand behind that very merit; whereby I’m not saying “choose vendor x and it’ll make your practices better; make your practices better in the first place and you will want to leverage vendor x as a platform to enable you”.
The exceptions of course are where there are clear competitive differentiators which enable the business to meet or exceed their own expectations.
But like all guarantees, I like my SLAs and guarantees to be as straight forward as possible and something I can explain to my pets on how they can take action on it, and when it fails (like insurance) I like to know I can get my payout without headaches.
Keep on Fosketting!