Data Storage Capacity Mostly Wasted In Data Center

Lucas123 writes "Even after the introduction of technologies such as thin provisioning, capacity reclamation and storage monitoring and reporting software, 60% to 70% of data capacity remains unused in data centers due to over provisioning for applications and misconfiguring data storage systems. While the price of storage resource management software can be high, the cost of wasted storage is even higher with 100TB equalling $1 million when human resources, floor space, and electricity is figured in. 'It's a bit of a paradox. Users don't seem to be willing to spend the money to see what they have,' said Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research."

Comments

Intentional?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about your data center, but ours keeps drives well below full capacity intentionally.

The more disk arms you spread the operations over, the faster the operations get, and smaller drives are often more expensive than larger ones.

Plus, drives that are running close to full can't manage fragmentation nearly as well.

Re:Intentional?

[TrisexualPuppy]

Yep, that's how we run things at my company. Drives and controllers have fewer files to deal with, and all else assumed equal, you get better performance this way.

You also have to think of the obvious spare capacity. In 2005, my company invested in a huge (at the time) 10TB array. The boss rightfully freaked out when we were hitting more than 30% usage in 2007. After having a slow, quasi-linear growth of files for the previous couple of years, the usage jumped to 50% in a matter of months. It ended up that our CAD users switched to a newer version of the software without our knowledge (CAD group managed their own software) and didn't tell us. The unexpected *DOES* happen, and it would have been incredibly stupid to have been running closer to capacity.

Accounting would have probably had half of us fired if they hadn't been able to do their document imaging which tends to take up a lot of space on the SAN.

Yet another sad FUD or FUD-esque article based on Forrester's findings.

Let's play the odds:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Likelihood that I get fired because something important runs out of storage and falls over(and, naturally, it'll be most likely to run out of storage under heavy use, which is when we most need it up...): Relatively high...

Likelihood that I get fired because I buy a few hundred gigs too much, that sit in a dusty corner somewhere, barely even noticed except in passing because there is nobody with a clear handle on the overall picture(and, if there his, he is looking at things from the sort of bird's eye view where a few hundred gigs looks like a speck on the map): Relatively insignificant...

Slashvertisement

[hcdejong]

for a storage monitoring system.

Disk space is free

[amorsen]

Who cares if you leave disks 10% full? To get rid of the minimum of 2 disks per server you need to boot from SAN, and disk space in the SAN is often 10x the cost of standard SAS disks. Especially if the server could make do with the two built-in disks and save the cost of an FC card + FC switch port.

I/O's per second on the other hand cost real money, so it is a waste to leave 15k and SSD disks idle. A quarter full does not matter if they are I/O saturated; the rest of the capacity is just wasted, but again you often cannot buy a disk a quarter of the size with the same I/O's per second.

Re:Overprovisioning

[Maarx]

That mother is terrible.