Hu Yoshida, a fellow who I greatly respect at HDS, has blogged requesting the latest datapoints from anyone who has been tracking storage efficiency. I wanted to share with him and readers of this blog a short opus I penned late last year.
Hope it helps.
I did a series of training seminars last year on this topic that, curiously, received great attendance in London — but not so great in the US, where storage efficiency is confused with storage IO performance, it seems. I started my preso pining for an app that would let me evaluate storage efficiency…
Here is the top menu for my theoretical storage efficiency app
Drilling down…
Capacity Allocation Efficiency submenu
The first option would provide, at a glance, a metric or two concerning capacity allocation efficiency, which some folks think is all there is to storage efficiency — making sure your apps and users have enough elbow room to save their data…
But capacity allocation efficiency is only part of the issue...
I think we really need to start getting real about capacity utilization efficiency, which looks at what data is being stored and its value to the business, frequency of re-reference and cost of storage to determine how it should be stored…
Hence a Capacity Utilization Efficiency metric option...
There are other metrics to track as well…
Including IO performance...
And
data protection services status...
And…
energy consumption metrics...
Whether you adhere to climate science or find yourself in a state of denial, we still need to pay the power bills. According to Dell, storage is now the biggest power hog in the data center. So we need metrics on that too.
Basically, this app would be useful in determining our overall (in)efficiency in storage infrastructure. Additional metrics, which I surveyed in my slides, would give us different views of efficiency from an operations perspective and a financial perspective.
Hope it helps.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Thanks for clarifying this discussion on storage efficiencies. I like the distinction between capacity allocation and capacity utilization. One additional efficiency would be storage management efficiency where you can manage heterogenous storage systems as a common pool of storage resources with one set of tools rather than fragmented silos each with their own management.
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