socialmedian: Debunking Utilization As Justification

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Debunking Utilization As Justification

Submitted by Sfoskett from Google Reader

Oct 29, 2009

Summary

If I sit through another presentation or sales pitch that tells me how a product will save me money by raising my storage utilization, I'm going to get violent. Ever since the development of the SAN, vendors have been extracting money from users based on promises that their new shared disk array, virtualization widget or storage management application will pay for itself by increasing the customer's disk utilization. For ten years now, we've spent a lot of money but the savings have been elusive.

Basically the myth of savings from improved utilization is based on two false assumptions. The first is that a typical enterprise is using 3-30 times as much raw disk space as they have data, because of limitations on the tools the storage administrators have at hand.

This is the basic "if we put all our data on a single storage array we'll raise utilization" situation: if each server has its own RAID controller and DAS disks there must be at least a disk's worth of free space on each one. By using a single large array, all of that free space can be in a single po ...Read the full article

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