Storage, probably like a college girl buying a belt. Be ready for the freshman 15 Provisioning and utilisation seem to be a perennial subject — there still seems to be a massive problem with large enterprises who appear to have far too much storage for the amount of data they store. There are many reasons for this, and there is certainly fault on both the customer and vendor side. Firstly, as a customer, …
> Thirdly, as a vendor you need to be up front about the usable capacity
Define "usable". Under what workload? With what expectations for performance/capabilities? Does that usable include backup/snapshots? RAID? With or without storage efficiency features like compression/dedupe? And with those features, at what ratios?
It's probably unfair to assume that vendors don't want to be upfront. A reps job is to position their products in a way that gets a customer to buy them, so they're going to position them in the best light.
If you share more accurate data with your vendors up front, or example telling them what you want them to quote you for usable, what conditions etc. I suspect vendors would leap with joy since it's a lot easier to produce an accurate config and result in a happy customer than the customers who just go "I need 200TB What is your price/GB? You're too expensive compared to vendor Y".
What a great comment. Everyone focuses on the cost per wongabyte, without including the "extras" which make the storage useful - protection, performance, replication, re-purposing, de-dupe, etc, etc. If the beancounters had a (very simple) way of understanding the value of what is bought (which naturally includes the extras), then decent comparisons can be made between vendor x and vendor y proposals. We need the conversations to get away from the cost of the spinning rust / flash, to the value the business gets. I don't how to do this (there are many brains way cleverer than mine), but if I can present value, I might get more of the stuff I actually want and the business needs. I've all but given up trying to convince a beancounter that vendor x's proposal is best, as I get deeply lost in the game of spreadsheets, lies, future benefits, waffle, marketing, freebies, etc, etc.....
"Not having been a college girl, what's a freshman 15?"
It's an unspeakably depraved act, and I would strongly suggest that you don't do what I did, which is to type it into Google to find out what it actually is!
(P.S. No, it's not really.)
Content generation is growing, and files are obviously getting bigger. But the exponential growth in storage capacity I thought was growing faster. I thought that storage capacity was accelerating away from content generation. It certainly is in our household. It's now safely a non-issue. The 24Mpix cameras simply can't keep up with the cheap 3TB HDDs. Not even my lovely wife can take 100,000 pictures in a year. Maybe 50,000, but not 100,000.
The cloud storage services becoming larger and cheaper provide more evidence that they're not having any shortages either.
Good article and something that still goes on way too much in the industry.
If a vendor has a "best practice" of not filling an array over say 70% due to their architecture then you're right, either the pricing should reflect this or at least it should be made more open in the "usable" numbers. It's a bit like a tax on every purchase made that for some reasons seems to have become accepted, even though it doesn't have to be that way as there ARE storage vendors that don't slow down at high utilisation levels.
There's still way too much marketing hype in the industry and the sooner this stuff comes more discussed and out in the open, the better.
Gavin:
Is the idea that you cant fill ANY filesystem and not incur a penalty something previously unheard of?
It's no secret anywhere, it has not been for 50years of storage system evolution...and wont ever go away either.
The cost of mis-managing a storage solution has never been a hidden topic.
No SB..I think you're wrong, because this is a freshman year argument, it's specious and misleading.
You purchase an amount of storage. The 'usable' after raid/spares, etc, is a fair way to look at ROI. We all get that.
The PHYSICAL cost of an array based on what you physically get is under vendor control.
Past that, how you use it, they are no longer in control, and do not own the result. Green field destiny brother..you pick.
The is a point with all vendors, where you will incur operational penalties if you abuse the architecture. It's an immutable fact of having a filesystem..its a system.
To do what it does for you, it has rules, and there are no secrets in the storage industry at any level, what those are. Begin to fill it up, and you _really_ wont like it if you blindly expected the behaviour of it to remain static.
There is not a single filesystem that supports a transitory (data moving in, out, changes to data, etc) workload, that takes no penalty when you fill it up.
Sure, you could say "but what if I fill it, have no changes, take no snapshots, and only read from it" you can go farther with that on anyone's FS, but you still cant go 100% without accepting some form of penalty to your business at some point. At least short of a CD/DCV/Tape storage. But we're no talking about those.
The space available that you do NOT use, is your cost of doing business to maintain a steady, even, repeatable result to your users.
If 80% and no penalty is the line, and YOU decided not to lose 5% by going to 85, 20% at 90, and 75% at 98, and risk opening the door to an alternate dimension at 99.5%.
That is not the vendor's issue to price down. That is your unique dataset, with your unique workload, and that will, with your knowledge of what those limits are, deliver you your unique result.
This is your choice in how you administer your enterprise. And your vendor is there supporting you at ANY level you wish to fill it up to.
It isn't Hitachi's, EMC's, Netapp's, HP's...Microsoft's...nobodys.
Who here calls MS to complain that your PC slows down when the HD gets very near full, anybody?
No, you accept it as part of what filesystems require to perform the way they need to, to give you what you need. I -know- the moment I get too full on my desktop, I can feel it..and so does everyone else reading this.
The value that YOU place on resiliency and performance are your internal costs of doing business, and how you communicate WHY you simply cant use every bit and byte, is why you're employed as the Sr. Storage guy somewheres.
Can a vendor do better? Possibly. Should they..yes, indeed. Push them to. Tell them you expect it.
But to say 'it should cost less' because you cant use some of it, is a circular argument. Because at any price that the product is introduced to you at, you could say "It should be 20% less...because..."
But since you're already receiving a % discount off list with your vendors (who doesn't), you are already receiving relief from what you theoretically choose not to use to protect your enterprise.
And hey if you used almost all of it at that point, you got away with something for nothing.
With Regards..a faithful reader. :)
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