Space – The Final Frontier
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People who have worked with computers for a decade or two have "war stories" about how small hard drives used to be. In any circle of IT people, the one-upmanship becomes laughable. The first volley of "I remember my first disk was only 30MB and it cost $200" comes flying over the bow, and someone returns fire with "Our first server had two mirrored 90MB disks for a company of 100 people." And, on it goes, until some old-timer chimes in with a mention of MFM or RLL drives, which silences all of the ungray members of the group. The youngsters frantically fiddle with their phones to find out what MFM and RLL mean.
Trust me, if you don't know what MFM or RLL drives were, you don't want to know. Some things are better left in the past.
We now speak of multiterabyte-sized drives like we once spoke about our new 125MB drives, but whether we speak in megabytes of spinning, mechanical platters, or terabytes of NAND flash, we can never have enough space. Our space requirements grow by numbers that we can neither comprehend nor accurately predict. We don't care that we waste it. We allow virtual machines to consume it at alarming rates. We place terabyte-sized disks into systems that only require 100GB at most over the life of the computer itself.
Space truly is the final frontier.
We think of disk space as being cheap, yet disk capacity is now perhaps an enterprise's largest financial outlay. According to Gartner's Enterprise Storage Management research, storage grows at about 45 percent per year. That number implies that storage capacity doubles every 18 months. The number that's more surprising is that only 65 percent of enterprise storage is effectively utilized.
At US$ 30 to US$ 50 per SATA drive terabyte, it seems that we can afford to waste space, and we do. At 65 percent utilization, how much space do you waste in your data center?
The solution to this runaway storage inflation is to manage storage
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