Data Storage Capacity Mostly Wasted In Data Center 165
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by
CmdrTaco
from the and-they-never-turn-the-lights-off dept.
from the and-they-never-turn-the-lights-off dept.
Lucas123 writes "Even after the introduction of technologies such as thin provisioning, capacity reclamation and storage monitoring and reporting software, 60% to 70% of data capacity remains unused in data centers due to over provisioning for applications and misconfiguring data storage systems. While the price of storage resource management software can be high, the cost of wasted storage is even higher with 100TB equalling $1 million when human resources, floor space, and electricity is figured in. 'It's a bit of a paradox. Users don't seem to be willing to spend the money to see what they have,' said Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research."
Re:100TB = $1 million (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't know that I've got $25000 dollars worth of storage at home :-)
It's not worth that much in your home, unless you happen to have redundant power supplies and redundant uplinks.
Or IT is provisioning for peak usage (Score:4, Informative)
Having too much storage is an easy problem. Sure it cost a bit more, but not prohibitively so or you'd never have gotten approval to spend the money. Not having enough storage, OTOH, is a hard problem. Running out of space in the middle of a job means a crashed job and downtime to add more storage. That probably just cost more than having too much would've, and then you pile the political problems on top of that. So common sense says you don't provision for the storage you're going to normally need, you provision for the maximum storage you expect to need at any time plus a bit of padding just in case.
AT&T discovered this back in the days when telephone operators actually got a lot of work. They found that phone calls tend to come in in clumps, they weren't evenly distributed, so when they staffed for the average call rate they ended up failing to meet their answer times on a very large fraction of their calls. They had to change to staffing for the peak number of simultaneous calls, and accept the idle operators as a cost of being able to meet those peaks.
CYA Approach (Score:5, Informative)
This is the CYA approach, and I don't see it getting any better. When configuring a server, it's usually better to pay the marginally higher cost for 3-4x as much disk space as you think you'll need, rather than risk the possibility of returning to your boss asking to buy MORE space later.
100 TB for $1,000,000? No way! (Score:1, Informative)
OK, bare 1TB enterprise class drives cost about $130 at Newegg retail. (half that price if you go for standard grade disks)
A hundred such disk drfives will set you back $13,000.
Figure another $10,000 for mounting, power supplies, connectors, and other obvious hardware.
Another $2,000 for four racks.
Floorspace? Racking them loosely gives you 25 per rack or 4 racks. Each rack is about 10 square feet, or 40 square feet ... roughly the same as the power cost ... another $1100 per year.
At $10/square foot, that's maybe $400 or $500 a month or around $5,000 per year
Electricity? 100 drives at 8 watts per drive yields full time load of 800 watts;
at a nominal $0.15 per KWhr, that's around $1100 per year in electric bills.
Air Conditioning
Replacement at 2 percent failure rate is perhaps $200 per year.
Human costs? The cost of labor to support a 50 TB disk farm can't be much different from that of a 100TB farm.
Indeed, it's probably less labor (and software) intensive to have a system with great overcapacity than one that needs squeezing.
In either case, at most, a 100TB disk farm might need 2 full time staffers. Generously, that's $150,000 per year.
So hardware costs of a 100TB system is around $25,000.
And annual operating costs of around $3,000 per year.
Labor costs of $150,000 per year.
Where do they get the $1,000,000 per year?
Re:100TB = $1 million (Score:1, Informative)
Just get married. Of course that will cost you more in the long run - hookers are bounded by the hour.