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OEM Data Optimization Solutions |
OK, so I'm "borrowing" Steve Duplessie's (old?) title (which I just noticed looks like it's changed) for this blog post, but I felt it fit perfectly with my thoughts. So, thanks Steve! I'm a techie type that knows enough to get most things working but, sometimes I change one too many configurations and everything gets screwed up. In this case however, it's not me...it's them! I'm talking about my last two week battle trying to get my VoIP phon...
For the first time in probably a dozen years, I'm not at SNW this week. Part of me is ecstatic to be home for once and part of me feels like I'm missing the reunion with the gang! My wife's business travel plans collided with mine for this week giving me the opportunity to stay at home with the kids. I can see some gourmet meals happening this week! While everyone else is in meetings this week, I thought I'd get caught up with some bloggin...
I spend a lot of my time talking with Permabit customers and more and more recently I have heard questions on proper use of encryption in their storage environments. Lost customer data is a huge risk to businesses, and risk often directly translates to cost, either from legal penalties or in cleanup. For example, companies which handle credit card data have been scrambling to comply with the PCI Data Security Standards, and still in the news we...
As a follow on to my initial post on the pending Data Domain acquisition (by someone!), here are some additional thoughts (take 2!) For NetApp, they were basically left at the alter acknowledging to the world their product technology/portfolio shortcomings. They opted for the "buy" vs. "build" strategy. EMC has now one-upped them with an offer they basically can't counter with cash. We'll see if the latest NetApp counter of cash + stock holds w...
Over the last few weeks, there have been various announcements in the storage world that continue to echo the point Tom made in his February blog post titled "The Squeeze is On." We've seen both EMC and IBM make announcements that they will be adding SSD technology to their storage arrays. Permabit announced yesterday the continued partnership and certification with BlueArc and their Titan solution. And I'm sure there will be many more in the ...
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Since we released our 4010 model last week at a list price of $250K for 144TB ($1.92/GB) of storage including dedupe, replication, advanced data protection, retention policies/WORM, and thin provisioning, I've been asked how we are able to provide our value tier storage at such a screaming deal to enterprise customers. Today I'll outline five ways we drive down storage costs and compare the relative cost savings to primary storage costs.
1) We reduce costs by advancing down the commodity component cost curve. And we pass the savings on to the enterprise. In Figure 1, the commodity cost curve is the green line and by proxy the proprietary cost curve is in red. Hundreds of millions in marketing dollars (represented in aggregate by the shaded green area) are spent by three-letter vendors to keep customers on the gently sloping proprietary cost curve. In contrast, we require no API, adhere to standards based interfaces like NFS and CIFS and enable customers to ride down the rapidly declining commodity cost curve for savings. When comparing the cost of Permabit at $1.92/GB, this is up to 10X less than primary storage price points.
Savings: 3-10X investment reduction.
2) We apply file aware, in-line dedupe for all information ingested by Permabit storage. In combination with compression, this reduces the footprint of information so you invest less, manage a smaller environment, lower energy costs and reduce space costs. Mileage can vary widely in this area, but customers often see 50-75% (2-4X) reductions for file shares to > 99% (>100X) for VMware images. This is how we lower the effective cost of storage below a $1/GB.
Savings: >2X investment reduction and operational efficiencies.
3) We've implemented the most advanced data protection in the market - our RAIN-EC patent pending scheme is more than 250X effective than RAID 6. That means lightning fast rebuilds and greater safety, but also 50% lower overhead than similar mirrored systems and less rebuild space required.
Savings: 2X investment reduction.
4) You'll never need to provision or allocate a LUN with Permabit storage. We take care of that with thin provisioning by virtualizing the storage space. Our customers tell us this enables them to gain 50% storage utilization improvements and savings of one headcount per 200TB managed.
Savings: 2X investment reduction and operational efficiencies.
5) Permabit has eliminated migration as a cost of storage. As requirements grow, new storage is added. As nodes reach the end of their useful life, they are simply replaced with updated and more efficient technology. Fork-lift upgrades every 3-5 years effectively double the cost of your storage. Permabit future proofs your storage and eliminates the need for migration and associated risk and overhead.
Savings: 2X investment reduction and operational efficiencies.
There you have it. All totaled, we deliver a minimum of 12-20X+ hard cost reduction and typical 2-month ROI to our customers. It isn't rocket science. But it is cost efficient by design. Our goal is to drive the marginal cost of storing one more byte of information to near $0. At an effective cost of <$1/GB with the 4010, we are moving toward our goal. Try our ROI calculator out and see for yourself! I look forward to driving down the cost of storage for your organization.Yesterday was a holiday for some folks. Many people weren't aware that Monday was Patriot's Day which also coincides with the running of the Boston Marathon. So if you are with a company headquartered or have a remote office in New England, you more than likely had yesterday as a day off! The Boston Marathon had me thinking about the grueling task of running mile after mile, hour after hour. It's definitely not a race where you lace up, do 30...
I'm just back from SNW in Orlando where storage people get together a couple of times per year to compare industry news and trends. This year I was struck by a big theme that reinforces what we are hearing from analysts and customers. A massive shift is occurring in storage - a move to what some are calling "Value Tier Storage." Basically there are two types of companies: those who are on the value bus and those that aren't. Here's the juice. ...
Last week Gartner released a new round of Cool Vendor reports. One of them was focused on Cool Vendors in Archiving, which I am pleased to say Permabit was included in as the only hardware vendor highlighted. Click here if you would like to read the full report. It's nice to see that the industry, especially during these tough economic times, really is starting to see the value of archiving when it comes to saving organizations money. The early ...
I recently read an interesting report from Doug Reid, Equity Analyst for Computer Systems and Storage at Wall Street firm, Thomas Weisel Partners. Doug pointed to market share gains made by up and coming public storage vendors - Compellent, 3Par and Data Domain. He contrasted their growth with quarterly declines reported by Net App and EMC. "The robust rate of data growth and associated storage cost appears to be driving an accelerated shift to ...