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My background is in accounting so I have a fondness for numbers. I never met a spreadsheet that I did not like. I have parlayed my skills into a few areas in the IT analyst world, and most recently, I have built some models for customers to help justify certain investments. Some of these projects have been on the storage side and others have centered on electronic discovery related issues. Most analysts spend their time trying to help customers beat up vendors on price, but we have taken a different tactic by helping IT folks make some smart buying decisions. Here is what I have uncovered during my financial modeling:
- The biggest cost in storage is by far the amount of redundant data (multiple copies of the same information as well as the same bytes) and the amount of backups / replicas of this duplicate data. This is the source of all data center space, power and cooling, and management issues that most organizations face. ESG research suggests that the majority of users that have deployed data de-duplication are getting 10-20x. This is not surprising given the modeling I have done on how many copies exist inside an organization.
- Electronic discovery costs are linear. Legal service providers charge per gigabyte or per document. Attorneys get paid the same amount of money regardless of how many documents they review. The only way to save money is to reduce the amount of data that gets funneled into the electronic discovery process. If you want to spend less money on electronic discovery, you have to spend money on something that allows you to find data quicker and search it so that you are sending less data to service providers or attorneys for review. I am on a crusade to convince legal and IT to set aside some capital budget for IT products that can help with electronic discovery because the spending here is out of control.
- I just ran a budget for an entire storage environment. Labor was roughly ten percent of the total. I ran another one, and labor was around 5% of the total. I also gathered some utilization metrics (how much capacity was allocated and not used, how much was configured, not allocated, etc). In some cases, the cost of underutilized storage was a higher percentage of the total budget than labor. Maybe it's time to invest one or two more bodies and some resource management software (the labor is needed to set up and run the software and then do something about it).
- Backup is still growing as part of the overall IT budget, but some of this money can be saved if customers are smart with how they use it. For example, if an organization buys an archive solution with some of their 'backup' money, then there is less data in the primary environment to back up (because you have archived the stuff that is not changing). Therefore, you may not need as many media servers and certainly not the most powerful ones, and I know you pay a license fee based on how many media servers you are running or how big the servers are that run the backup software or how much data you back up.
It was a great weekend. First, I decided to fly United instead of American which meant I was actually home for the weekend - that makes the Tech Wife happy. Second, the Boston College men's hockey team won the national championship. I am a huge BC hockey fan and this year's team was very deserving of the honor. The hero of the team is a five foot-five inch Energizer Bunny (but much tougher) type of player that scores goals and is very, very scrappy. Third, I played Guitar Hero (on Wii) for the first time with some friends. The Tech Wife and I are not that good, but our friends are. Nintendo (along with other game consoles) has come a long way since Atari and Super Mario Brothers. In honor of hockey heroes and Guitar Heroes, this week's bullets reference future efforts of technology (or innovators of technology) that are needed:
- An out of the box, easy to set up home media storage system. I want my DVR (everyone knows that the Tech Wife and I watch alot of TV), my pictures, movies, etc all on the same device. I want to backup all my PCs to one place. The closest I have seen is Data Robotics solution the 'DROBO'. It is pretty clear that companies are working on this (EMC, IBM, Google, etc), but I am going to need something soon.
- A dictionary for all of the 'new age' Text Message / Facebook / MySpace terminology. And, I thought the tech industry had too many acronyms.
- Anything that improves Air Traffic Control or airline operations - please.
- Someway to make password management simpler. I hate remembering all my work and personal username and passwords. Poor doctors and other people who have to remember other important things and then figure out what their Windows login is. There has to be a better way than the basic 'password keepers' and other weak approaches. I am not saying we need 'single sign on' for the consumer, but 'consumer-izing' the RSA fob / dongle thing could be interesting.
- An online notification system for restaurants. Sometimes the Tech Wife and I fail to make reservations for dinner but we want to go to a decent place that may be crowded. Right now, we need to make a phone call and ask how long the wait is. If we could put a few restaurants on a favorite list, and check, in real time, how long the wait time is at certain places, we could make much quicker decisions and avoid the "I don't know, where do you want to go?" back and forth conversations that happen to every one of us.
I just hopped on a plane from Chicago, IL to Richmond, VA. I had a great seat, right up front, which meant I had plenty of legroom and I could get off this germ tube as soon as we pulled up to the gate. Then, the flight attendant told me and three other folks that we had to move to the back of the plane because the plane was a little ‘nose heavy’. Translated – ‘You are on a small plane and we need to move you chocolate chip cookie-eating folks to head back to the cheap seats or this thing isn’t getting off the ground’. The flight attendant did start her request with ‘No offense, but you have to move…’ None taken. I prefer to live than worry about what anyone else on this tin can thinks of my waistline. I think that line is a good idea for this list. No offense, but…
..I am bored with electronic discovery being the only real application of search technology outside of advertisements. I finally met a company that uses search to solve a different type of problem. Krugle helps developers locate code from internal and external sources. The benefits are less repetitive development, fewer patent infringements, and better quality software / microcode. …HP’s acquisition of Tower is big news. The media just isn’t smart enough to ‘get it’ and therefore customers are being mis-educated. Tower has some good Enterprise Content Management solutions but the real steal for HP was Tower’s partnership / integration with Microsoft SharePoint. Sure, some archiving solutions already support SharePoint, but Tower has taken it to a new level and added incremental capabilities that it will share with the public soon enough. ...IT has no more excuses for mailbox quotas. E-mail attachment management is making a comeback. Yep, that’s right. Because two thirds of organizations have mailbox quotas (which is just silly in my opinion), IT departments have to find other ways to handle large attachments that often burn through a quota. Thru, Inc. and Proginet are two that have caught my eye recently. If you use one of these solutions, you may not need a mailbox quota because any message with a large attachment will be sent with these solutions.
The Tech wife is back. It's time for entry number two. Again, kudos to Bill Simmons of ESPN for coming up with this idea of having his wife blog so he can watch more sports, as that is what I am doing this week.
I work in higher education, you know a University, located pretty close to the center of Silicon Valley. It's funny because I feel like we, the employees, are the cobbler's kids' without any shoes. IT in education presents a few challenges, most of which frustrate me to no end. My frustration list...
- I get an e-mail almost 10 times a week that says the same thing 'Your mailbox is over its size limit.' For me that is 700MB. My colleague gets the same e-mail that says her limit is 500MB. Why the difference? We keep deleting and archiving our messages, but to no avail. Where do I get more MB? I wish you could just buy them at Target like anything else. Instead I have to go through the IT department, my boss, etc. I bet that kid on campus that makes the fake IDs (come on, you all know/knew him/her) can probably score me some MB faster.
- My job deals with a lot of paper (Think applications, transcripts, etc). I think the paper in my office alone killed a small rain forest in Africa. There has to be a way to send these files electronically that is safe and secure. Think how many universities in the world would use this service!. Not to mention I could trash all those filing cabinets in my office leaving me plenty of room to do yoga, cartwheels and other 'work' stuff. That brings me to my next bullet...
- FILES!! When I need to get a file from 1980 I literally walk downstairs to a storage room we have named the "dungeon." This 'room' is dusty, smells of mildew, has a crooked floor (no doubt from the weight of the files) and has all records dating back to the stone age. There needs to be a way to get these files saved electronically so that they can live out their existence in cyberspace and I can access them with the click of my mouse. Thanks to my allergies (see Brian's previous blog), I avoid this experience at all costs.
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