Jon Toigo  |
 |
Jon William Toigo is directeur en eigenaar van Toigo Partners
en voorzitter van The Data management Institute LLC. |
15 april 2010 - Corporate bad guys
A few weeks ago, on the advice of friends of mine in the marketing and PR business, I joined the masses who use Twitter as a method of social networking. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having had bad experiences in the week or two that I had a Facebook page up and running.I was less than enthusiastic, but my friends told me that I was “hurting my brand” by not opening up this avenue of interaction with readers of my work. I am not sure that I have a ‘brand’ or even what a brand is, but I took the plunge. Among the first exchanges in which I found myself involved, I encountered a seemingly knowledgeable storage consultant. Apparently, I had provoked him with a general assertion I tweeted to the world. It was the simple observation that we could buy back up to 70 per cent of the capacity of every disk drive we already own if we just got serious about data management.
Dark storage
By data management, I was referring to three things. First, using storage resource management tools to spot ‘dark storage’ (allocated but forgotten), stale and orphan data needlessly occupying disk, and capacity holdbacks deliberately placed on our arrays by vendors. Second, applying some ‘data hygiene’ to get rid of contraband and junk files. And third, implementing intelligent archiving to data that we need to retain but never reference and move it off the spinning rust and onto green media like tape or optical.
Tape library
This idea was at the front of my mind because of some interesting discussions I had recently enjoyed with Novell regarding their outstanding Novell File Management Suite, with Spectra Logic regarding their amazing T-Finity tape library, and with FujiFilm and IBM regarding the application of perpendicular magnetic recording to new barium–ferrite-coated tape media that will shortly yield an LTO-style cartridge with a 35 TB capacity. It seemed to me that soon the technology would become available that might enable us to make a meaningful adjustment in the costly storage capacity growth curve that virtually all companies are confronting today. This tweet had no sooner issued from my TweetDeck into the ether of twit-dom when it caught the attention of this consultant. I don’t remember his ‘brand’, so I will call him Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg—or Zorg for short. Zorg, as those of you who may recall the 1997 action-scifi motion picture The Fifth Element will know, was the quintessential corporate bad guy. He argued that destruction, disorder and chaos were the foundations of the good life. In the Luc Besson film, Zorg pushes a glass off the edge of a table, shattering it into pieces, which results in many small robots activating to clean up the mess. He notes that destruction creates the need for these robots. The robots themselves represent jobs for hundreds of engineers and technicians, food and education for their families, and many other attributes of the good life.
Destruction
Destruction, he concluded, has a very positive outcome. I call the fellow who tweeted me ‘Zorg’ because he was making essentially the same case as the Gary Oldman character. He chastised me about my tweet, which encouraged people to reclaim their storage capacity by managing their data better. If everyone did this, he argued, the storage industry would come to a grinding halt. People would stop buying storage wares at the clip they are today, profits would decline, workers at OEMs would lose their jobs, innovation in storage (like my ‘Twitter brand’, though I’m still not sure I know what that means) would come to a halt, dogs and cats would sleep together, and Armageddon would result.
Overpriced
Today, I hear Zorg when I listen to a storage OEM talk about on array tiering. It’s a non-granular way of moving anonymous bits around between tiers of overpriced high-speed low-capacity disk and slower-speed high-capacity disk to make room for more anonymous bits. I hear Zorg when a vendor extols on-array thin provisioning or, in other words, over-provisioning the capacity of spindles. I hear him in many pitches by deduplication vendors who want to sell me a box of commodity spindles, enhanced by their controller functionality, for a thousand times the price of the raw drives themselves. Frankly, I don’t know or care what the impact would be of better data management practices on the fortunes of a storage industry run by the Zorgs of the world. As a business consumer, my top line should be as important to me as my vendor’s top line growth is to him.