You've got petabytes of unused storage, says Formation. Er, do we?

Formation Data Systems says there is stranded storage capacity in virtual server environments., The firm says it can locate this in servers and storage across a data centre, pool it, and provision it as a flexible shared storage pool, giving extra storage capacity with no extra hardware purchase. How much? Oh, terabytes or …

[Mage]

Nuts

See title.

[J.Goodwin]

Data duplication?

Data duplication sounds like a great way to sell you more storage.

[kagrahar]

Re: Data duplication?

Yes. DeDup is a way.

What is mentioned here is a different approach and yes, as the "nuts" in the first comment pointed out, it sounds "nutty" but it is real. You can email [e-mail] for more info

[Steve K]

Re: Data duplication?

The original comment said (in an ironic manner..) Dup, not de-Dup.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the real world

There are two trends. The uptake of blade serves with shared storage. No room for Formation there. Then there are the 10% looking at hyper-converged. No room for Formation there either. The first post is right, this idea is nuts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds plausible...

... if this was consolidating desktop storage. Let's say you have 1100 desktop PCs, each with a 1TB hard drive, of which 900GB is unused. There's a petabyte right there.

Of course, ensuring each machine is *on* when you need it is a different matter...

[Adam JC]

I may be missing the point here, but if you reclaim all of this 'unused space', what happens when the device/SAN/VM it's attached to requires that space and it's been dished out elsewhere?

[StorageInsider]

Sounds like a fine method for doing non-essential workloads that can be 'kicked out' when the primary workload needs it back. They got $27M in funding, which is pretty impressive, so they probably convinced somebody there's a market for it. Threats to the model? Customers increasingly using their storage efficiently. But hey, look in your closets, folks, I'll bet you'll find a lot of wasted space.