Exclusives

Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 1

Lately I have really been away from blogging; seldom get time to read the blogs I follow every day, can’t remember the last time I was on Twitter.

Read the entire series of posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA):

Part 1: Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics

Part 2: The IT — Storage World of 2009

Part 3: The IT — Storage Budgets of 2009

Part 4: Some Fundamental Questions

Part 5: Facts about your Data

Part 6: Inconsistencies in Storage Environments

Part 7: The Technical Case

Part 8: The Business Case

Part 9: The End Result

Work has been really busy and motivating these days, with new Service offerings we are taking to our customers and partners throughout the world, life has become more than challenging, trying to work around multiple time zones, conference bridges, airplanes or customer sites for presentations, white boards and demos.

It seems the harder we work, the more digital antisocial we become (getting away from LinkedIn, Blogging, Twittering, Gmail’g, Orkut and Facebook)?

So a lot of my work these days has been around Storage Resource Analysis (SRA) that we are offering to our customers. What I plan to do over the next several post is go over a few things to describe these services and how it fits into today’s IT / Storage Environments.

I will try to leave these blog posts to minimum number of words (possibly 400 max) but will try to describe how it helps customers in these tough economic times to better optimize storage with immediate ROI and immediate CapEx and OpEx reductions.

We will talk about the technology and the way it fits into a customer’s environment overall providing resources that help customers better leverage their existing storage assets.

I have lately been reading some blog post by David Merrill and am starting to understand the importance of Storage Economics and how it plays a major role into customer environments related to applications, usability, budgets, ROI, etc.

Hope you find these posts interesting and informative. It might help understand the necessity of Storage Economics for your environments.

Experience

I had a very unique experience with my recent trip to a customer site: This is a large customer running several PB’s of storage. I asked them a question during a brainstorming session, how do you anticipate your storage to grow over the next 12 months. To my surprise one of their chief Storage Architects responded to me, the OEM (not to mention any names) told us earlier this year that we are growing at an average of 70% a year.

This really got me thinking, I started researching this customer to understand how their data was growing at 70% a year. The share price of the company is not growing at 70% (rather lost all its value in 2008), the product sales of this company is not growing at 70%, they are not hiring employees at a rate of 70% a year (rather have shrunk to half the number of employees), their engineering / research divisions haven’t grown at 70% a year, application owners, host systems & projects they are working on are not growing at 70%, neither is the storage industry growing at 70%. The more I started thinking, the more it didn’t make sense.

I am just going to leave this post here…..I will let you judge the rest, have these things happened in your environment?

About the author

Devang Panchigar

With more than 7 Years of IT experience, Devang is currently the Director of Technology Solutions and IT Operations at Computer Data Source, Inc. Devang has held several positions in the past including Sr. Systems Engineer, Sr. Network Engineer, Technical Support Manager, Director of Storage Support & Operations. He has been responsible for creating and managing worldwide technical support teams, technology solutions team, operations management, service delivery, pre and post sales support, marketing and business planning. In his current role Devang oversees multiple aspects of the Technology Solutions Group that works with various Multinational and Fortune 500 companies providing them infrastructure services. Along with various industry certifications, Devang holds a Bachelor of Science from South Gujarat University, India and a Master of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina A&T State University.

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