SA storage approach bemuses Sun exec

By Leon Engelbrecht for Sun Microsystems

Johannesburg, 20 Feb 2007

Sun Microsystems StorageTek CTO Randy Chalfant shakes his head at what he sees as a South African tendency to hurl money at data storage problems.

Speaking to ITWeb during a recent visit, he said he was astounded to hear from "hands-on operational people" that they were proud of the fact that they had endless amounts of money to spend.

Manfred Gramlich, Sun storage practice lead for sub-Saharan Africa, says the attitude is a reflection of a buoyant economy that allows company IT organisations to argue that "we are making a fair amount of money, so just get the job done; and if you need more storage just go out and buy more storage".

Chalfant says this approach is "dangerous, very dangerous, in terms of cost impact on the company and even their own jobs". He says there is no fiscally responsible CFO or CEO on the planet who will agree with the idea that problems are solved by throwing increasing amounts of money at it. "That's a very back-of-the building thought," he says.

Sun research at 200 global companies has shown that, at best, most companies were using just 30% of the storage volume available appropriately and well. At one unnamed German bank the figure was 1.6%. Chalfant says he has no local figures "because I haven't yet met anyone who is measuring it".

Explaining typical usage patterns he says 10% of space is wasted because it is orphaned. "Someone allocated space to a server and the address either gets cut off, consolidated, moved or is made to disappear, but the space is never de-allocated and moved back to the free pool." Fifteen percent of space is allocated but unused. "Someone goes to a systems administrator and cries for some capacity, which is granted, but they never do anything with it; so it is allocated but unused."

Five percent is inappropriately used. "It is JPEGS, MPEGS, WMA, QuickTime; people install illegal iTune servers and bring their music collection in [to work] to illegally share and there are some stuff that is really illegal, stuff you don't want to be caught having on your server," he says. Finally, "40% of the data - get this - has not been referenced in six months or more. It is inert - allocated, but inert. That means that only 30% of the volume was looked after appropriately and well used."

Chalfant says companies would be well advised to stop buying, as they are wasting money. "You have an option. At one point buying more space was the only option. Now there are more."

He says his presentation on Sun's solution to the problem has received mixed reviews. "If I have a conversation with technology people; they don't want to hear it. If you go to the people managing operations and have this discussion, it is a threat. They feel it has the potential to uncover a poorly managed environment that will make them look bad. That is not the case but that is what people perceive. On the other hand, the higher you go up the management chain the more excited people become."