By all accounts, 2012 is going to be a rough one for data storage provisioners. IT is entering a new era characterized by an abundance of data, where growth rates will go north of 50% per year. Add to that a predicted shortage of some 75 million HDD’s due to flooding in Thailand and, um, we have a problem here.
High data growth and a shortage of disk drives? No problem, you say – IT is used to solving problems.
For example, here are a few ideas you might have already kicked around:
1) Stop the data growth
a. Tell Marketing that they don’t really need that analytics app, big data is just hype, right?
b. If Engineering is generating any data from sensors, send it to /dev/null and hope they don’t notice
c. Block your users from downloading any mobile apps that generate or store data
2)
D Delete old data
a. Tell Sales that all powerpoints, spreadsheets, and documents older than 1 year will automatically be deleted on April 1, 2012. They will think this is an April Fool’s prank and just laugh. On April 2nd when they storm your office you can say “didn’t you see my email?”
b. Tell Legal it’s OK to delete archived email – the SEC is so consumed by the elections and Occupy Wall Street that corporate eDiscovery will become obsolete
c. Convince Accounting that most of their spreadsheets and reports are unnecessary and can be deleted since no one reads them anyway
3)
Us Use other storage technologies
a. Delete data from primary storage and copy it over to good ole tape. Paste the word “days” into your data recovery SLA’s anywhere the word “minutes” appears
b. Ask your CFO to throw a couple more million into your budget for SSD’s. Make sure that you don’t mention the words “early adopter” or “price erosion” when discussing this
c. Convince your IT Director that Automated Storage Tiering really does work, but avoid the terms “Hierarchical Storage Management” or “Information Lifecycle Management” at all costs.
If, for some reason, the above tactics don’t work (and if you still have a shred of credibility) there is one more option. Storage Efficiency is implemented for one of two reasons - inspiration or desperation. If you are clever, you can leverage both. Without telling your peers just how desperate you are, you can feign inspiration by quickly turning on just 3 of NetApp’s Storage Efficiency features: Thin Provisioning, Deduplication, and Compression (they are all free.) I suggest you do this quietly on a Friday afternoon when everyone else is at the weekly Engineering beer bash.
When you arrive at work the next Monday morning, and you’ve seen your storage requirements shrink by, say, 50%, the next step is to walk the aisles of IT with your shoulders high while crowing “well, I guess we can cancel that storage expansion project!” As you are looked upon in disbelief, you casually mention how you spent a few hours and “turned on some efficiencies” to save the department a whole bunch of money. Now that you have the adulation of your group, your status will suddenly elevate. You’ll be mentioned quietly in the lunchroom as “the guy/girl that saved our skin” or “that dude/babe that freed up our budget.” You might even be asked to train the rest of the group on “whatever the heck you did” to reduce storage requirements by so much.
Now, at this point you might be asking “how do I get started?” Just follow DrDedupe’s 3-step plan:
Step One: Make sure you have some NetApp storage systems somewhere on the floor
Step Two: If you can’t find any NetApp systems, click below to read about the V-Series storage controller
http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/v-series/
Step Three: Download and read the following Technical Reports:
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3958.pdf
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3966.pdf
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3965.pdf
That’s it – 3 easy steps to buying fewer disk drives 2012.
Happy New Year!
DrDedupe
