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Tag: costs

  • IDC: External Storage Cost Efficiency Assumptions Must Change


    While economies of scale have helped reduce power and cooling costs, other costs related to external storage prove to be more expensive than the storage itself, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    A recent IDC report estimates that the total cost to manage the world’s installed base of external storage is around 60 per cent of all storage related spending.

    This includes software, power, cooling, administration, personnel and services and excludes the cost of acquisition of the storage.

    David Reinsel, group vice president, IDC Storage and Semiconductors research, said that power and cooling costs are not the only costs associated with external storage.

    "In fact, in the grand scheme of things, the cost to power and cool external storage pales in comparison with the cost to acquire and manage storage, including the costs for storage software and storage administrators," he said.

    In the context of the economic meltdown IDC’s study comes as a stark reminder that the costs to power, cool and manage enterprise storage must be scrutinized in detail.

    It is also important to calculate the total cost of managing the world’s installed base of external storage.

    It is a fact that for every dollar spent on storage hardware, managers will spend three dollars for managing the stored information.

    There is an urgent and growing pressure to change assumptions around the adoption of more efficient storage technologies.

    The report asserts that the focus on energy reduction technologies is a must and firms must recognize the full extent of firms’ overheads.

    Storage management must be recognized as the key issue in today’s exploding data environment.

    Hundred terabyte and even petabyte sites are not uncommon and managers must look beyond the traditional methods of storing and securing critical corporate information.

    They should appreciate that deduplication, compression and thin provisioning have low penetration but high costs in terms of power and cooling.

    Advances in storage hardware and software have made solutions, like Hierarchical Storage management, archiving and disk grooming and automation, attractive.

  • Report Aims To Demystify "Hype and Rhetoric" Around Green Data Storage


    Storage vendors worldwide have jumped on the "green" bandwagon in their marketing campaigns, but it’s often hard to determine which technologies move beyond hype and rhetoric to have a real positive impact.

    A new report from Forrester Research suggests, however, that adopting an environmentally responsible approach to storage can help to make it more efficient, reducing capital and operating costs at the same time.

    Entitled Align Green Storage With Overall Efficiency it says that poor measurement capabilities, high switching costs, and overall buyer conservatism have limited green considerations from having significant influence on purchase decisions.

    Its author, Andrew Reichman, says the report is intended to highlight the approaches that make the most economic sense.

    "In a gloomy economy, initiatives that sound good but have little measurable influence on the bottom line are unlikely to receive funding, so sorting through the claims and identifying benefits that are achievable in the near term is key to a successful green strategy in storage."

    He goes on to say that given the current economic climate, there are green storage approaches that are likely to see higher adoption. Among them:

    • Dense drives, such as SATA and FATA, are the greenest storage technology going and can have a tremendous impact on the green and financial bottom line
    • Thin provisioning can reduce the overall footprint of usable data and dramatically increase storage utilization, which is often low because of large upfront allocations that often sit idle
    • Deduplication eliminates redundant copies of data. Forrester expects significant focus on these capabilities, which significantly reduce the amount of disk space required to save a given amount of data, from vendors in the near term.

    An abstract of the report is available here.

  • Cisco Reveals More Details On UCS Platform


    Cisco has revealed more details on its Unified Computing System (UCS) for virtualized data centers a month after it was first announced.

    Company executives used a live Internet TV broadcast to provide further insight into pricing, processing power and memory capacity.

    The networking company’s UCS is a mainstream data center computing platform that promises to seamlessly integrate processor, storage and network systems in a virtualised architecture.

    It offers medium and large enterprises a single architecture that links all data centre resources together, so overcoming the "assembly-required" nature of distinct virtualisation environments.

    Starting in the second quarter of 2009, Cisco plans to offer complete systems of up to 320 compute nodes housed in 40 chassis, with data flowing across 10 gigabit Ethernet.

    When first revealed in March, details on the UCS were limited, largely because the system is based on Intel’s Nehalem-class Xeon 5500 series of server chips, which wasn’t released until March 30.

    This week, Soni Jiandani, vice president of marketing for the Cisco Server Access Virtualization Group, and David Lawler, vice president of product marketing for the Cisco Server Access Virtualization Group, provided some more details

    They revealed performance-test results that show UCS performs either first or second in benchmark tests against competing systems in trials conducted by VMmark and SPEC, which will have full results available soon.

    Cisco also added new details around its Memory Extension Technology, a core component of UCS, which Cisco said enables the CPU to access four times the amount of memory compared to typical blade systems.

    The company said its memory extension can cut memory costs by 33 per cent to 60 per cent in 64-GB, 96-GB and 144-GB deployments, while expanding available memory to 192 GB and 384 GB.

    They said this solves the problem of users running out of memory before running out of CPU availability.

  • IBM Buys Transitive To Cut Customer Costs


    IBM is to to buy Transitive in an acquisition intended to help its customers cut costs.

    Once the deal is completed, IBM is expected to move the virtualization software company’s California personnel to one of IBM’s local sites.

    Research and development staff located in Manchester, UK, will remain at their current facilities.

    IBM has been using Transitive’s technology in its IBM PowerVMTM software, which consolidates customers’ Linux workloads onto IBM systems, since January .

    Transitive has sold more than 10 million copies of its cross-platform virtualization technology and has 48 patents.

    Its product, QuickTransit, allows software applications that have been compiled for one operating system run on systems with different processors or operating systems without modifications.

    Transitive’s technology is based on research developed at Manchester University in 1992. The company was founded five years later by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer-science lecturer, and a team of his graduate students to bring QuickTransit to market.

    In 2005 the company signed Apple as its first major customer.

    Apple and Silicon Graphics, along with IBM, are Transitive’s OEM customers. The company has been providing QuickTransit technology to run Apple’s Rosetta translation software and the product is shipped on all of Apple’s Intel-based computers.

    No price has been released for the purchase.