When in doubt, businesses buy more storage

Imagine driving a car without a gas gauge. You have no idea how much gas is in the tank and worry that you're about to run out, so you stop at every gas station you see to buy more. Storage managers in data centers have much the same problem.

They purchase additional storage capacity and then assign portions of it to various purposes -- the database program, the e-mail program, and so forth.

Once they've apportioned all the storage capacity, it looks like it's all used up (though they set some aside as a reserve). The storage vendor, of course, is happy to sell them more.

"This is sort of the dirty little secret of the storage industry," said Ray Villeneuve, president and CEO of MonoSphere. After a storage vendor delivers the customer's newest array, "the sales team is hovering, already working on the next $2 million deal."

Privately held MonoSphere itself offers storage resource management software designed to give customers an accurate picture of not just how much storage they have but how much they are using up.

Many storage administrators endure a laborious process to figure that out, said Dianne McAdam, a storage industry analyst at The Clipper Group. They often use monitoring applications that place software agents on servers to track how much data is sent to storage. But they have to add up the numbers from each of what may be hundreds or thousands of servers, then manually match the results to the amount of storage provisioned for each application.

"It's ugly, it's painful," said McAdam, who once worked in the industry doing that very task. "I was doing queries to each storage appliance and just putting them into a spreadsheet manually."

Said John Kelly, product marketing manager for the Storage Essentials management software product at Hewlett-Packard: "There's a joke in the industry that Microsoft is the leading storage resource management vendor because everyone uses Excel."

Smaller, niche players like MonoSphere and Onaro offer specialized storage resource management software, McAdam said. Similar firms have been acquired by larger vendors, such as the 2005 HP acquisition of AppIQ, to integrate into their own management software.

MonoSphere's Storage Horizon software runs on its own server on the customer's network. Instead of using agents deployed on each server, MonoSphere views the volumes of data generated by the application servers and correlates them with the storage capacity allocated to those applications.

If one portion of storage is being underutilized, it can be reallocated to another area that needs it.

Brent Ozar was surprised at the results after he took inventory using Onaro software of the 80TB of storage he manages at Southern Wine & Spirits, a beverage distributor in Florida.

"We had about a half dozen servers that we had equipped with [storage] space that have never even used it. We were able to free up several hundred gigabytes of space by just going through and starting to ask questions," Ozar said.

On average, only 35 percent to 40 percent of storage capacity is being utilized, usually because various departments overestimate their storage needs, said Steve Norall, senior analyst with Taneja Group.