A waste of space: Bulk of drive capacity still underutilized

Near the turn of the century, data centers were only beginning to implement Fibre Channel storage-area networks (SAN), with most relying on direct-attached storage (DAS). Data utilization rates were abysmal, with data centers on average using just 25% to 30% of their hard disk drive capacity.

Despite Fibre Channel and IP SAN adoption and the advent of technologies such as thin provisioning, storage resource management, capacity reclamation and storage virtualization, storage utilization rates remain at 40% or lower. In other words, IT shops aren't using as much as 60% of their storage capacity, wasting electricity and floor space.

"Most people I talk to don't even know how many terabytes of capacity they have on the floor, much less what their utilization is. And a lot of them don't even know how they'd measure it if they could," said Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research.

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Near the turn of the century, data centers were only beginning to implement Fibre Channel storage-area networks (SAN), with most relying on direct-attached storage (DAS). Data utilization rates were abysmal, with data centers on average using just 25% to 30% of their hard disk drive capacity.

Despite Fibre Channel and IP SAN adoption and the advent of technologies such as thin provisioning, storage resource management, capacity reclamation and storage virtualization, storage utilization rates remain at 40% or lower. In other words, IT shops aren't using as much as 60% of their storage capacity, wasting electricity and floor space.

"Most people I talk to don't even know how many terabytes of capacity they have on the floor, much less what their utilization is. And a lot of them don't even know how they'd measure it if they could," said Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Without better use of storage management tools, users won't be able to track utilization and improve it, Reichman said.

Reichman is one of several industry analysts who believe storage utilization today still averages between 20% and 40%, mainly because thin provisioning and storage management applications with advanced reporting capabilities that could point to wasted storage assets aren't being used.

"It's a bit of a paradox," he said. "Users don't seem to be willing to spend the money to see what they have."

For an enterprise-class data center, comprehensive monitoring and reporting software can cost as little as $250,000 or as much as $1 million, and in many cases a full-time employee is needed to manage it, Reichman said.

Rick Clark, CEO of Aptare Inc., said most companies can reclaim large chunks of data center storage capacity because it was never used by applications in the first place. Aptare's main offering, StorageConsole, is used for backup and storage capacity reporting. It can show admins where and how storage is being utilized.

Clark said the main problem in data centers today is that there is no single way to view host servers, networks and storage to determine how efficiently assets are being used.

Aptare's latest version of reporting software, StorageConsole 8, costs about $30,000 to $40,000 for small companies, $75,000 to $80,000 for midsize firms, and just over $250,000 for large enterprises.

"Our customers can see a return on the price of the software typically in about six months through better utilization rates and preventing the unnecessary purchase of storage," Clark said.

In many cases, companies buy more raw disk capacity than they need because the base cost of hard disk storage is pennies per gigabyte. But Reichman and others say that it's a fallacy to think that disk storage is cheap, because it costs money to manage and it eats up data center floor space and electricity.

"I start out every presentation with a slide showing it's a higher percentage of IT spending than any other area. Yes, the dollar-per-gigabyte [cost] has gotten cheaper, but application data growth rates are tremendous," Reichman said. "Saving 100TB of capacity out of a storage environment represents $1 million."