From The Chair - 

Remember, Remember...

The last edition of E-PING concentrated on virtualisation. We have probably all heard the tales about servers running at less than 10% capacity, but what about storage, our current theme?

At a recent presentation from a Tier 1 vendor (not HP), I was told that the average utilization of storage within an organisation is less than 20% ie the used disc (as opposed to allocation) is only about a fifth of the total purchased. In hindsight I’m not too sure if within an ‘organisation’ they included desktops, in which case I could believe the 20% figure, but if this is just for servers and centralised storage I am a little more sceptical. Either way, though, it makes a convincing argument for efficient and effective storage management and storage virtualisation.

Data is probably the fastest growing asset your company owns, although the value of that asset does depend on your storage management policy. How many discs have you bought simply to hold multiple copies of emails with potentially unnecessary attachments? There is of course value in much of the data - and it is growing rapidly, although my senior management keep asking me to justify why it is growing quite so rapidly. The answer, of course, is that we are doing much more with the data, and saving more complex data.

A useful ‘fact’ I also learnt at this seminar was the rate of increase of storage required by medical imaging. Just a few years ago X-Rays were large pieces of film and any storage requirement was simply the reference number and link to patient data. X-Rays then became digitised and now 3-D and even 4-D colour images (including time information) are stored. The storage requirement has grown by a factor of a million from those 2-D scans.

And what about transient storage? At another conference, this time on data centres, I attended a talk on the power requirements of DRAM. The speaker explained that typically DRAM requirements account for 30% of the power usage of each server, ahead of the CPU load that accounts for only 25%. There are ways of reducing this - by choosing lower voltage memory chips or moving to more modern components - and these too could make a big impact on your bottom line.

 
As we will be well into December (or even January) by the time this edition of E-PING is published, it is a pleasure, at the end of another year, to thank you all for your continuing support of hpUG, and to thank the staff and volunteers who keep the group running.

I wish you all a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year

John


Mail me at chair@hpug.org.uk This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it  with any comments you may have.

John Owen
hpUG Chairman