HDD = heavy discounts disappearing

Whilst I, as a DataCore employee, certainly don't want to be seen to be taking advantage of other people's misfortune, the facts are that there is a shortage of hard disk supply at the moment due to recent flooding in Thailand. As has been widely reported, Western Digital, Toshiba, Intel and others have been directly affected and, with the current situation being as it is, the usual rules of supply and demand are taking over, i.e. costs of hard drives are going up. This is of course perfectly normal, just ask the hoteliers in Newmarket when there's a big weekend of horse-racing. Room prices double at least. And, just as punters need to be flexible as to where they stay to avoid being fleeced during Guineas weekend, IT consumers also need to find ways around paying through the nose for what are normally very inexpensive hard disks.

A storage hypervisor can provide the answer.

Firstly, what is a storage hypervisor? Well, it's a software layer that sits directly above the storage hardware and, amongst other things, turns whatever type of disk it finds beneath it - be it direct-attached, fibre-attached, iSCSI-attached, SAS, SATA, SSD, Flash, old, middle-aged, new, made by, sorry bought from HP, bought from IBM, bought from EMC, bought from HDS, bought from whomever - into one completely anonymous pool of resource for the application servers that need it. This of course isn't the official DataCore company description and there is a lot more that a hypervisor does than just unify heterogeneous storage resources, but, for the purposes of this blog entry, I think you get the point.

So how does this help avoid HDD price hikes? There are three main benefits (plus one handy side-effect):

1) Open up the whole HDD supplier market. With a virtualised storage infrastructure, you can buy whatever disk you like - from whomever you like. No longer are you tied in to one manufacturer; DataCore just sees a disk, not the vendor badge on the front. Independence = flexibility = choice = lower cost.

2) Consider SSD. Solid state disks are not as badly affected in terms of supply as "spinning rust" as I've heard HDD described. With previously inexpensive hard drives becoming expensive, the gulf in cost to SSD is rapidly decreasing. So why not try out some solid state memory and use DataCore's auto-tiering functionality to ensure it is not clogged up with "dead" data but hosts just the data your users are accessing most frequently.

3) Sweat the assets. Enabling customers to re-purpose existing or aging kit is one of the main reasons DataCore has done so well, particularly in sensitive financial times. Disk doesn't suddenly stop spinning after 3 years, despite what the tier 1 storage vendors may have you believe when they present you with the support quote for year 4. With a bit of thought, planning and the use of technologies like thin provisioning, existing storage or even server hardware can be re-purposed within your environment and you may not actually need to buy new disk.

And finally, the handy side-effect I mentioned is looking to the CLOUD. The current swear word in the IT industry. It means everything to some, nothing to others. In this scenario, I purely mean off-site storage resource that you can avail of, possibly temporarily, located in a huge data-centre that doesn't belong to you and you'll probably never see. I'll leave the whole security and data retrieval thing to someone else but the fact is, there are plenty of companies out there who will sell you a virtual hotel that your data can live in for a while, or even for ever, perfectly happily, perfectly comfortably and perfectly securely.

How to get it there? Storage virtualisation makes data mobile, dynamic and flexible. With DataCore (and TwinStrata, our cloud gateway partner), you can auto-tier workloads off to your chosen cloud or IAAS ("Infrastructure as a Service") provider at the click of a button. I'll cover this in more detail another time.

So you see, you don't necessarily have to wait another 6-12 months for prices to come back down again, you just have to re-think the way you view (and buy) your disk. We're all doing it with VMware on servers, what makes you think you can't do the very same thing with storage?