Alan Cullop, CIO, NetJets

Snip! 8 Tips to Cutting Storage Costs

Strategies from companies around the world

NetJets, which has offices in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, makes it easy for companies and individuals to fly anywhere in the world, at any time, by simply picking up a phone. "We answer within 10 seconds or less and they tell us where they want to go," explains Alan Cullop, the company's CIO. "We're responsible for arranging ground transportation, getting their food preferences for the flight, and arranging an aircraft and crew to be available when they need it."

Not surprisingly, this level of customer service generates a lot of data, especially when you factor in that the company has grown to seven times its original size in as many years and is equal in fleet size to that of the world's second largest airline, explains Cullop. "We store sales-related data, marketing-related data, and all the operational data related to maintaining, scheduling, and flying aircraft-huge amounts of data we keep for operational purposes and for regulatory purposes," he says.

Regulatory requirements dictate that some data must be stored indefinitely and some data must be stored for seven years. Like any company, if NetJets isn't careful, its profits could be eroded by inefficient data management and storage. The desire to manage the growing demand of storage capacity is one of today's top trends. An IDC report illuminates the pace of growth: worldwide external disk storage systems revenues grew US$272 million in the fourth quarter of 2006, hitting the US$4.8 billion mark, up 4.9 percent year-over-year.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to keep storage costs down. Here are eight suggestions from our experts:

Don't grow blindly

A significant chunk of storage costs comes from administration and system downtime. Adding a single disk can take as much time and effort as adding 10 disks. "It sounds stupid, but a lot of times the best way to reduce storage costs is to manage and plan for it," explains Mike Jude, research director at Ptak, Noel & Associates, an industry research firm based in Broomfield, Colorado. "There are cheap ways and expensive ways to do everything. Moore's Law (which predicts that the number of transistors on a computer chip will double about every two years) applies to storage more than anything else. Prices are decreasing, but we're constantly creating more stuff to store, so predicting storage needs is hard. You've got to be constantly thinking ahead so you're never adding space in crisis mode."

Another tip: consider NAS gateways, so you can add a disk once and allocate as needed.

Employ virtualization

Disk virtualization reduces administration costs and improves disk usage and performance. Because you can manage storage capacity as logical volumes without having to manage at the individual logical unit number (LUN) level, it also makes data migration a snap since you're moving data not from one disk to another, but from one part of your infrastructure to another.

"Provisioning gives you the ability to be more dynamic and manage your data without customers or users even knowing it's happening," says Andrew Reichman, industry analyst with Forrester Research, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It can also save you a lot in the migration process."

Dan Trim of Health Alliance Plan, one of Michigan's largest health plans, says virtualization changed the way his organization does business. Before implementing virtualization, Trim, the Detroit-based company's director of operations for UNIX systems and database management, was often bogged down trying to add new storage and manage his existing direct-attached storage environment.