Be SURE About Storage Capacity Management

Most companies have a capacity management process in place to manage service levels and to control costs for their networks and servers, yet many overlook the fastest growing component of the IT infrastructure – storage. While storage may appear to be highly affordable, in reality the opposite is true. Even as storage unit prices continue to decline 25% annually, capacity continues to rise 50% or more, due to exponential growth of storage consumption by applications, compliance requirements, and data protection strategies. The result is alarming storage spending increases of 10% to 15% every year. In most businesses, storage costs are rising much faster than IT budgets and have become a financial burden that is impacting the rollout of major company initiatives1.

Despite these rising costs, storage is generally significantly under-utilized. Based on many petabytes of production data analyzed by MonoSphere, expensive storage assets experience a wasteful average utilization of approximately 30%, and most companies have 15 – 24 months of excess capacity on the data center floor.

Utilization is so unacceptably low because storage usage has been difficult to project due to the rapid creation and change rate of data, and the size and complexity of storage infrastructures. Out of the tens of thousands of individual volumes, file systems, files, and databases that consume storage infrastructure, some are highly utilized, while others have plenty of extra space. Some logical elements experience explosive growth, while others remain flat. Efficiently managing the sheer number and heterogeneity of these different storage elements with existing tools has proven to be impossible. This complexity has left administrators with no choice but to overprovision storage to avoid shortages.

Systematic, Usage-based Regimen for Enterprises(SURE) is a storage capacity management system that determines current and predicts future storage array usage (the amount of storage that contains application or end user data). SURE can significantly raise this utilization to 75% or more, drastically reducing storage capital expenditures and further reducing operational expenditures such as power, cooling, and data center floor space – without the jeopardy of an out-of-storage condition.