ORIGINALLY POSTED 1st August 2009

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Yet another couple of weeks go by. July is our busy month at home and with family. 4 birthdays (including my own yesterday), 1 anniversary, and of course the start of the school holidays. For those that follow me on twitter and facebook, the Millenium Falcon was an epic Lego project for Callum and I, and now has pride of place in his bedroom.

I was going to start by saying how busy stuff had been at work, but then that seems to be the norm these days. I’ve found myself in a nice position where I still get to physically play with real hardware and software, making changes to code, and driving hardware changes into the product and out the door. Meanwhile I enjoy meeting with customers, existing and prospective, gaining an understanding of what business issues are affecting them today, where they want to go tomorrow and how we can help.

SVC has always been about making better use of what you have, commoditizing capacity, and removing the lockin of ‘buying more of what you know and hate’ just because its the easy option. In the last few months as the economic situation reallly hits home, not only to small and medium business where the pain is all too real, but in large enterprises. Its causing people to stop, take check of where they are and ask if they really can justify buying another one of those big monoliths. Maybe one major competitor in the storage business really does rely on being able to sell you another can of Pepsi, and how much better this years can tastes than last years, but at the end of the day its just another can of coke. You may have become an addict, but you can break the habit. All you need is an out. A product like SVC can give you that light at the end of the tunnel. A way to break from what you’ve come to loath, and a way to bring choice back into the equation moving forward.

Even if its not a case of moving away from what you know, but how can I squeeze more out of what I have. Wouldn’t it be nice to pool all of your storage resource into one easy to comprehendable view, one set of tiers, and see how much space is no longer needed. A change is as good as a holiday some say. If you start a migration project, you soon see how much stuff was wasted. How much is mapped and no longer used, how much is not mapped but you thought it was. IBM Services can provide a SPACE analysis of your environment. We’ve typically found that up to 40% of your storage capacity is not actually in use.

In some cases many hundreds of TB can be reclaimed in a matter of days, just by performaning a SPACE study.

This doesn’t need a product like SVC to be installed to perform such a study, but once you have reclaimed your wasted space, it makes sense to implement an over arching solution that can keep track of what you have, what you are using, and what you have free. This can be achieved with careful monitoring, agent installation and SRM tools such as IBM’s Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, but the reclamation and dynamic movement of data, consolidation of capacity, and of course overall performance management can become a day to day reality if you chose to install a product like IBM’s SAN Volume Controller.

If you are under pressure to look to make more use of what you have, improve storage administrator productivity, and be able to provision new storage in a matter of minutes, contact IBM, your account manager or local IBM business partner, and look to see how we can help you implement a more dynamic information infrastructure. It shouldn’t take the current econmic situation to make you think about it, but now that we are here, how productive can we be when things pick up again, if we learn the lessons now.