Unisys flags up customer storage waste
80% of large storage shops inefficient, badly run
Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime
Unisys wants to alert its customers to their storage waste by offering a free analytics run, and then help them fix the outflow of wasted storage cash.
Storage Fusion, which provides the analytics software, offers it as a service. Its software is given access to a customers' storage infrastucture and goes through its connections, devices, nooks and crannies searching out things like utilisation, capacity allocation, disk tiering, and power consumed by storage hardware right down to the individual disk drives. Customers access their report through a web portal, it all being a self-service deal.
Storage Fusion makes its money by selling the analytics service, with customers using the report to rein in excess and unnecessary storage spending and make their existing kit work more effectively.
Unisys is partnering with Storage Fusion to offer its customers this analysis of their installed storage. An analytics run and report is free for companies with a minimum of 50TB of data.
Unisys reckons it can find so much waste and inefficiency in a 50+ terabyte shop that fixing it provides a return for the customer, and a profit for itself as well as covering the cost of the Storage Fusion service.
It says the storage intelligence they get can help businesses reduce power consumption by 50 per cent, improve storage utilisation by 30 per cent and potentially save millions in annual IT costs. They can also make better storage plans for the future.
All this is feasible because most customers with large storage shops run them badly - not that Unisys says that. However, it ran a survey that found that "more than 40 per cent of businesses have limited visibility, or almost none, into their existing data storage needs, and almost half struggle to forecast storage capacity."
Eighty per cent of its surveyed businesses failed to achieve the top 20 per cent's best practice level of 75 per cent storage utilisation, meaning plenty of scope for service engagements to bring them up nearer to best practice levels.
Nikki Wilton, director of information and data management at Unisys, said: “One large public-sector organisation that signed up for our... report discovered that large amounts of data were unprotected due to simple configuration issues."
These customers are running the storage part of their IT shops blindfold, but they got into such a tricky situation the Storage Fusion report can, Unisys says, immediately pinpoint areas of concern and enable them to do something about it. ®
COMMENTS
It Might Be Nice To Know for Curiosity's Sake But...
Underutilization is only one way to describe it. Other ways are reserve capacity, hot spares, distributed risk, distributed load, and many other good things. Its not a good thing to run at 95% utilization. And if your controllers are smart enough to power down drives after a period of disuse there is minimal power loss and a corresponding extension of life.
I know its not exactly the same thing but I'm actually trying to move more toward a lot of lightly used hard drives in my servers. The drives get more breaks and are less prone to overheating, there is less impact on performance from multiple users accessing different data sets, etc. Peformance is awesome when disk intensive programs actually read from and write to two entirely different controllers. Two green 5400 drives can outperform one 10K drive for typical server tasks and they cost less, provide higher capacity and generate less heat. All the drives last longer because they spend a lot less time seeking and thrashing.
I always laugh when vendors try to force you to put all your eggs in their one overpriced basket when you can buy 10 commodity baskets cheaper and get a lot of side benefits. Their main selling point is usually "reduced management costs" but this study is pointing out that the management component is failing. For them to achieve a savings of 50% on power implies that you have probably 3x as much storage as you need, it shouldn't be too hard to find the space in that case. If you only have 2 times what you need you won't be able to turn off half of it when you consider controllers, switches and such.
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