Storage Effiency and Optimizaiton – Balancing Time and Space

Here’s a link to the presentation I recently delivered at the Spring 2009 Minneapolis/St. Paul area CMG (Computer Measurement Group – CMG) March 20th, 2009 hosted by Nexus Information Systems and organized by Tom Becchetti. The theme of the event was "Is your storage efficient? There are many ways to rate your storage, how does yours stack up?". Tom organized a great event as usual with a diverse set of speakers for the well attended event graciously hosted by Keith Norbie of Nexus at their Minnetonka facility. The title of my presentation was "Storage Efficiency: Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who or What is The Most Efficient of Them All? Finding the Correct Balance" that looked at balancing the need to reduce (or maximize) space (utilization) with time (performance) to meet different requirements including maintaining quality of service, response time and availability.

Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as a data or I/O performance recession, there is a common myth that storage optimization or efficiency is all about driving up storage space capacity utilization which can be true for some environments, applications, data or storage types. However there is also the need to maintain or boost performance, reduce response time and latency, doing more work in a more productive and efficieny manner. Not all data or storage can be consolidated to boost utilization without concern for degrading or in any other way penalizing performance, response time or availability.

Thus it is about time and space, that is, balancing data movement and processing rates with storage space capacity utilization and that sometimes, more is not better for performance when it comes to ratios or the number of components in a solution.

Likewise there is the need to balance energy avoidance with energy efficient, balancing the need to store more data in a smaller footprint using less energy and the need to process more data in less time efficiently for productivity.

These and other related themes are expanded on in more detail in my book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC). These and other related themes will covered in one of my upcoming presentations (The Other Green — Storage Efficiency and Optimization) at StorageDecisions in Chicago the week of June 1st, 2009, as well as in various seminars and events that I will be involved in the coming weeks and months.

Thanks to all those who helped organize, support, sponsored, presented and attended the recent CMG event, look forward to seeing or hearing from you all again soon.

Ok, nuff said.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
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