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In addition to capacity allocation efficiency, which most of us are addressing with thin provisioning, Jon points out the need for capacity utilization efficiency, storage performance efficiency, data protection efficiency, and storage energy efficiency. Expanding on his thoughts, I have added storage management efficiency.

Capacity utilization efficiency is about the placement of data on the appropriate tier of storage, based on frequency of access, business value and cost of the storage. This could be addressed by automated tiering based on policies that are triggered by time or events.

Storage performance efficiency could be addressed by automated wide striping or page level tiering, where only the hot pages of a volume—rather than the whole volume—is moved to high performance tiers of storage.  Ray Luccesi has a great take on storage performance efficiency in his IOPs vs Drive Counts chart of the month, which he posted last week.

Data protection efficiency, which is measured in terms of Recovery Time and Recovery Point objectives (RPO/RTO), is a major area for improving efficiency. This has to do with replication, backup, recovery, archive, etc. If most of the data is static data, which is not being updated like most unstructured data, you only need two copies for redundancy. You can eliminate making the many snapshots and backups of the same unchanged data over and over again.  Brad Clarke commented on my post that the most important storage efficiencies to him were the ones which make replication less bandwidth hungry. He makes the point that when data volumes increase, the cost of disks to contain that capacity is relatively cheap—compared to the cost of the increase in bandwidth pipes that is required to replicate it.

Energy efficiency will be a big focus this year based on the record increase in carbon emissions in 2011 (5.9% increase) that was reported by The New York Times. Another factor is the nuclear problems at Fukushima, which has sifted demand from nuclear power to carbon fuels, and is raising the cost of energy, as well as the possibility of carbon taxes on top of the energy bill. Since storage is becoming a greater percent of the power consumption in the data center, storage energy efficiency is becoming a key consideration for buying decisions. Storage energy efficiency benefits from the other efficiencies cited above, but there are also efficiencies of 40% or more with storage systems like VSP, which use Small Form Factor SAS drives, dense drawers, front to back cooling, and the replacement of batteries with flash for protection of the cache.

Another efficiency that comes to mind is Storage management efficiency: the ability to manage heterogeneous storage arrays as a pool of common resources with a common set of tools, so that resources like capacity and performance can be shared rather than isolated in silos.

Are there other areas of storage efficiency that we should be considering?

• Posted on: 30th January 2012 at 12:00am