Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat - Latest Comments in The Dumb Disk Fallacy

Re: The Dumb Disk Fallacy

petesteege — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:34:18 -0000

Great post Stephen! There's a corollary at the component level: "The premium for an enterprise disk drive is more than the sum of its hardware differences."

Have you ever looked at what % disk drives - or other hardware components - make up of a storage system's cost? I wonder if it has changed over time, or if it's one of those fixed constants.

Might be different for each of your above classes of storage.

Re: The Dumb Disk Fallacy

johnmartinoz — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:08:20 -0000

Another problem solved by a storage array is that, when well implemented, it can dramatically reduce the amount of effort to manage the storage environment. One of the most compelling arguments for this can be found in an interesting (though little known) pair of papers written by John Tyrrell which can be found here http://media.netapp.com/doc.... In it he states.

"The hundreds of studies done by the IBM Corporation in the 1980s showed that there was a one-to-one correspondence between the number of islands of storage to manage and the number of space failures, performance bottlenecks, job restarts/reruns, and the number of people to manage the storage."

Well managed storage array implementations can significantly reduce the number of management tasks, and provides levarage points for policy automation tools. Given the intense focus on operational expenditure that Cloud services brings, the value of an enterprise storage framework (including the arrays, software and services), that drives down overall expenditure should not be underestimated.

Re: The Dumb Disk Fallacy

sfoskett — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:56:41 -0000

Hahaha yeah this is so true. I had a $19 Martini the other day. While it was indeed delicious, it probably contained just $2 of gin, vermouth, and lime. Oops I just gave out my secret Martini recipe!

Anyway, why would I spend $19 for $2 worth of booze? Because the total package was worth it: I was with my friends after all. That's why we buy EMC, NetApp, and even Apple, isn't it? The total package must be worth it or folks wouldn't be buying...

Re: The Dumb Disk Fallacy

slippylane — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:11:23 -0000

Interesting article, and you make some good points. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but your analogies fall down - the markup in restaurants and on wines and spirits in bars is absolutely HUGE :-)