Symantec's new CEO, Enrique Salem, told
attendees in a keynote address at the Storage Networking World conference in
Orlando, Fla., April 7 that enterprises should stop buying new storage and
focus on obtaining better mileage from their existing systems.
"Stop buying storage. You heard me right: Stop buying storage," Salem
said. "How? Reduce the amount of information that you store in the first
place, and make the storage you do have more flexible and efficient."
Sounds like an odd statement, coming from a storage and data security company,
but Symantec certainly has its agenda, and it is nothing if not consistent. Rob
Soderbery, senior vice president of storage products at Symantec, spoke
the exact same message last August during the launch of the company's
front-line Veritas storage management software, CommandCentral.
The fact is, while headcounts and software purchases are falling, storage
hardware and data security purchasing remains on track or is increasing, thanks
to the incessant amount of data flowing into businesses.
"In this economic climate, when one-third of CEOs are expecting their IT
budgets to remain flat and many are expecting to see them reduced, the most
important measure of your success isn't the ROI," Salem
said. "It's ROY: return on
yesterday."
If you want to stop buying storage, Salem
said, there are four key opportunities that everyone should be looking at right
now: storage resource management, thin provisioning, data deduplication and
intelligent archiving.
'Orphan Storage' an Issue to Be Solved
Of course, Symantec offers those features, but so do a hundred other companies,
including EMC, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard,
Pillar Data Systems, Data Domain, 3PAR, IBM,
Dell and COPAN. These options are in more demand all the time.
"If you're like most companies," Salem
said, "you have a lot of 'orphan storage.' It's time to give your orphan
storage a loving family. You often have more room to grow than you
realize."
Orphan storage, in this case, refers to storage trapped in dedicated servers
that goes unutilized because the capacity is not included in a virtualization
scheme. Once attached to the virtualization layer, it becomes part of a much
larger pool of capacity that can be used much more efficiently.
Most enterprise data centers utilize only about 15 to 35 percent of the entire
storage capacity available. The remainder is used for unexpected overhead,
locked out of accessibility, intentionally kept for some other purpose or
simply lost track of over time.
All of it requires spinning disks and electricity from the grid that costs
money on the bottom line, whether or not the storage is in service.
"We had one customer who told us that they were managing massive
information growth. They estimated they were using 50 percent of their storage.
We showed them they were only using 20 percent," Salem
said.
"What you need are storage management solutions that work across different
platforms and give you an end-to-end view of the storage you have, the storage
you're using and the storage you're not.
"You need a better way to peek into your systems so you can make informed
decisions about how your existing storage assets are being utilized. Storage
resource management technology can help identify problem areas and
consolidation opportunities and create a priority list of solutions," Salem
said.
How Good Management Saves Storage Costs
How does managing storage utilization help you stop buying storage?
"When we first started working with [a large financial services company]
in 2006, they were using 12 percent of their storage. We worked with them on a
zero-growth storage initiative, and, two years later, they are at 41 percent,"
Salem said.
"That's progress. But the real measure of progress is $70 million. By
deferring new storage purchases, we helped them save $70 million. If you want
to see a happy CFO in a tough economy, tell them you've found a way to save
them millions of dollars."
That's not going to happen at every company, but it does happen.
Salem, who previously served as the
company's chief operating officer, is barely four days into his new job after
taking over for the retired John Thompson, who left after 10 years as CEO
on April 3. Thompson will remain as chairman of the board of directors.
Thompson had been under consideration for a couple of Obama administration
jobs: secretary of commerce and federal CIO.
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