Chalfant's Blog

The Death of Tape – Oh really??

Hooray for youth, for they shall inherit the world. For all of us parents, it is a test of patience to observe our children learning life’s lessons as they proclaim truth to be something we have learned already, and have found that ‘truth’ to be materially different.

I just read another article that mentioned that ‘old-timers’ will scoff at the idea that tape is dead. I read ‘old-timer’ as synonymous with a child enlightening a parent with their perception of truth.

Every time I listen to a customer telling me that disk is cheaper than tape, I can’t help but see the image of young Linda Blair playing the role of Regan MacNeil in the movie ‘The Exorcist’. Her eyes are creepy lights that glow, and when her mouth opens you hear the voice of Disk only vendors saying, “tape is dead’. Gee, I wonder why a disk only vendor would send out the message that tape is dead?

Look, there is some simple marketing math here folks. IDC reported that between 2005 and 2008, the installed capacity of disk will increase by 367%. Yet the amount of money that will be spent for all that growth is near flat. Also, most enterprises expect that they will hold their head count flat to manage all of that.

Business is pretty simple. Executive leadership cares about three things; 1) Making Money, 2) Saving Money, and 3) staying out of a little orange suit. It is the same set of rules for every single company that is publicly held. If you get this algorithm right, Standards and Poors, and Moodys will raise your ratings, institutional buyers will buy large blocks of shares, that creates the supply and demand problem, and that causes share holder value to increase. Simple right?

So guess what. If you are a disk only company, just like every other company, that means you have to grow faster than the market, and faster than the competition. If the total amount of money that is available in the market is flat based on what you are willing to spend, that means the revenue pie that is available to all of us vendors is fixed, and it is small. So how do you grow faster than the market to impress Wall Street? Well, you have two strategies you can use. 1) Saturation – where you have to displace everyone you can to own market share. If you have done a good job of that, and the hunting is getting thin, you need to 2) find new markets. 65% of the world’s data is on tape. That looks like a target rich environment to grow to the disk only companies. And so we hear the cry “tape is dead”. Of course they will tell you tape is dead.

If they can convince you to change from what is an incredibly cheap storage media, to move to something that will have a minimum of a 10X increase cost, which they collect – that’s called top line growth. The only problem is that it is taken from your bottom line. By the way, that’s just the Capital costs, the Operational expense to manage that disk is three times the cost to buy it. On the other hand, the cost to manage tape is 10 times less than disk.

Look, there is a massive amount of vendor hype and confusion that is out there on this. It is created for the benefit of the disk only companies. Calmer heads realize this and are doing the right things.

Part of our approach to this, is to lead with a business value assessment, where we can look at the operational needs and practices of you business, and then map the technology into a supporting foundation for the demands of your business.

In a survey of over 200 customers we looked at every single disk volume installed, and found that on average 70% of that space was wasted. If the disk only companies gave you the tools for you to see this, they would be in serious financial trouble. Instead they cry ‘tape is dead’, buy more disk. For those of you that have met me, you will remember the first thing I tell people is to stop buying storage. Better to focus on managing better what you have first.

We have seen companies realize savings on Net Present Value (NPV) calculations in the 10s of millions if not 100 million dollars. So can you.

I will be focusing this blog on the before and after of companies that use their infrastructure to optimize their business – so stay tuned.

In the mean while, let all of the youngsters that have a need to go with what’s cool and trendy have their head. Volume and reach don’t prevail on a balanced view, only time can provide that.

Posted at 09:39AM May 30, 2007 by chalfant in Sun  |