Does your company really need all that storage?

I was chatting not long ago to a sales guy from one of the big storage vendors. The market he serves is one of those where some of his customers buy a petabyte at a time – which I am sure he is happy about when it comes to hitting his sales quotas. The thing is, though, most companies have much more modest requirements. These …

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you are using a logical volume manager these days, so partitioning (and by that I presume you are referring more to mount points than PC style partitions) is of less relevance.

[NotWorkAdmin]

The real problem here...

...is simply that the users have an expectation of unlimited capacity and seemingly no way of determining what needs to be stored, and what should be discarded.

I dread to think what their homes are like.

[TonyJ]

Re: The real problem here...

"The real problem here...

...is simply that the users have an expectation of unlimited capacity and seemingly no way of determining what needs to be stored, and what should be discarded.

I dread to think what their homes are like."

Why?

Physical objects != Data

Equating data in a world where the likes of Google, Microsoft, Dropbox et al all give away GB of free storage to how people hold onto and store physical objects is not really comparable.

Combine that with the message people have been fed over the years to backup, backup, backup and I can see easily why the same pieces of information - photos, documents, etc are kept ad infinitum. Especially where there is no direct cost to the individual storing it.

[MyffyW]

Tiers before bedtime

Meanwhile, back in the real world we find that nobody really does this. The more tiers you have the more work there is to manage it all

Auto-tiering on one's storage array does away with that problem. Let the storage array processor decide which tier of disk the particular block of data belongs to and you can mix in SSD, SAS, NL-SAS, SATA and even cloud without chipping one's nail polish.

[CoreInfMan]

Great concept but....

I've witnessed it first hand where there has been so much activity on the storage moving data between the tiers that is has a impact (although minor) on latency. The default block size a storage system uses can come into play here.

[Boyan]

Do you really need a SAN

It is true that very few companies need PB of storage or more and it is usually object, rarely block. Most companies really need several TBs or several tens of TB, rarely even hundreds of TBs. While having shared storage is a must, you do not need to think of storage as a separate layer (think SAN) anymore - you can run fast, reliable, scalable shared storage on the compute nodes. With standard components all-way - from servers and drives to standard Ethernet. This will help increase utilization, slash costs and make things simpler.