Storage growth is the curse of cheap disks

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 08/08/06

In our recent research on data centers, we found many strong trends, including consolidation, growth and demands for availability. One of the strongest trends has been the growth in storage across all industries and all company sizes. The cost of storage (per storage unit, e.g. gigabyte) has been dropping at a pace that approaches Moore's Law for computing density. Disk is cheap, so cheap in fact that the natural response to a request for more storage is to buy more disk. Yet, the cost of managing storage is high and increasing as a percentage of the total cost of ownership. While cheap disks fuel the growth of storage systems, IT managers and storage teams are struggling to manage all this storage.

Storage has grown at a median rate of 22% year-on-year through 2005 and 2006. Yet many companies top even that growth, reporting growth rates of 100%, 150% and in some cases 300% or more. Several factors are behind this demand for raw storage: RFID in retailing and manufacturing, digital imaging and compliance in healthcare, and algorithmic trading and compliance in financial services. Each industry has a different driver but a common challenge: how do you control or constrain the growth of storage?

Here are some best practices that may help constrain the growth of storage:

* Always look at TCO, not just the cost of disk. As disks have gotten cheaper, storage management has become more expensive, more complex and more demanding. As a result, the cost of disk represents a shrinking percentage of overall cost and should not be the basis of purchasing decisions. You may come to regret all those new shiny disks when you realize how much work it takes to manage backups, compliance, allocation, migration, maintenance etc.

* Control waste - Most companies waste storage space. "Alice" is long gone from the company, but every file she created, relevant or not is stored, archived, backed up and taken off-site forever. Nothing ever gets deleted. Even worse, most files exist in multiple copies, as attachments in multiple mailboxes and on multiple backup tapes. Storage Resource Management (SRM) software should be the first resort to resolve capacity issues, not hard disk purchasing.

* Chargeback - Translate TCO (and SRM savings) to a chargeback mechanism. If the cost of disk is small to IT but zero to the business unit, more disk will be ordered. Unless you pass on the cost or at least create awareness of the TCO of storage, you will be inundated with growth. If business units pay or can account for the TCO of storage, SRM initiatives will be more readily adopted and implemented successfully.

* Compliance is one of the greatest costs that correlate with the amount of storage. In most public companies, every piece of data needs a retention policy, a backup policy and an access policy in order to meet regulatory requirements. A comprehensive "information stewardship" approach to data management, which Nemertes found during conversations for its research benchmark on information stewardship, is closely correlated with decreased costs and improved success in compliance.

As disk continues to get cheaper because of advances in material science and fabrication, it will represent a small and soon vanishingly small part of the overall cost of storage. Each disk purchase you make today sets you up for recurring operational costs that keep climbing, so constraining the growth of storage and understanding the total cost of ownership should be high on your priorities.