Enterprises have been super sized with primary disk for too long. It's like buying a 64 oz. Cherry Coke at the local 7-Eleven day after day when you really aren't that thirsty. Enterprises continue to buy more primary capacity than they need or can afford.
I've visited a lot of companies over the last several months and I have yet to meet one employed IT leader who was looking to spend more than they had to for their company's storage infrastructure.
Just like 7-Eleven with Cherry Coke, the largest storage vendors have a vested interest in continuing to super size customers. EMC, HDS and IBM generate over half of their storage revenue from high performance (primary) storage. Yet less than 20% of information in a typical enterprise is transactional. Just like the mere pennies a serving of Cherry Coke costs 7-Eleven, the cost of disk drives is a small component of primary storage price, the three-letter guys make more money if the enterprise buys more of the high-margin primary storage.
We are seeing three significant market movements which enable companies to stop buying primary disk and save huge dollars while satisfying all service level and data protection requirements.
Squeeze # 1 - information movement and archiving software is advancing, becoming more friction free and less costly and it is being used not only for email, but for file shares, database and other information required for regulatory, strategic or legal reasons. A host of companies make great products in this area like Atempo, CommVault, IBM, Symantec, and ZL Technologies not to mention simple scripting employed by many companies. Also, file virtualization is coming of age with the F5 ARX product. In short, there are many tools to help the enterprise to classify, move, access and retain information.
These products make it cheaper, easier and safer for enterprises to move information to lower cost tiers of storage while providing high levels of accessibility.
Squeeze # 2 - the storage "target" tier is now very low cost. By employing data deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, and advanced data protection we are producing the most scalable, most cost effective storage in the market today. In fact, the effective cost of Permabit Archive storage is less than $1/GB, a fraction of JBOD and often lower than tape, yet Permabit storage provides greater data safety, accessibility and resiliency.
Squeeze # 3 - new Tier 0 storage offers higher performance and is more cost effective than old-style primary storage. An example of this is BlueArc's Titan product (Permabit is certified with it). Notably BlueArc ships with a feature rich information mover which can automatically tier information based upon rules or usage patterns. That makes Titan a natural to deploy with a Permabit Archive and the result is higher performance, scalability and resiliency all at a fraction of the cost of primary storage.
When I say the squeeze is on primary storage, the pressure is coming from two directions.1. Below - Many enterprises simply adopt a simple tiering strategy and move fixed information off of primary to a Permabit disk based archive. That means 60-80% of primary capacity is freed up and no further investment is required. The savings range greatly depending on what an organization pays for storage, but I've walked into organizations where customers stand to save 70% on storage costs. In a multi-hundred terabyte environment and with fixed information growing at 40% per year, that translates to tens of millions of dollars in annual savings.
2. Above - Companies are beginning to move to Tier 0 solutions ala BlueArc today and looking forward, the adoption of Solid State Disk drives will further increase the pressure. These are high performing (better, faster, cheaper) than old-style primary and when combined with automatic tiering of fixed or inactive information to a Permabit Enterprise Archive, the enterprise gains efficiency, data resiliency, performance and massive cost savings.
So, when you are thinking about managing storage growth, resist ordering the 64 oz. Cherry Coke, reach for the double espresso instead.