Snapshot: How users manage capacity

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Storage resource management tools can help you track your storage resources, but most storage managers still calculate their resources the old-fashioned way - or not at all. Where does your shop stand on storage resource management?

You know (or could easily find out) your storage capacity?
"The SAN arena is crying out for a single tool that will provide statistics of current storage topology and usage."
Do you know your utilization rates?
The results of this month's survey reveal that storage administrators' attitudes toward managing their resources are as - ahem - heterogeneous as their environments. While a virtuous 71% claim to know their

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capacity at least to the nearest gigabyte, a disconcerting 16% admit to only knowing it to the nearest terabyte (at an estimated $0.15/MB for a high-end storage, that comes out to about $150,000 worth of unaccounted resources). Even more unsettling is the full 13% that have no clue what their capacity might be.

When it comes to disk utilization, a majority (54%) of admins claim to have at least a handle on their utilization rates, although an honest 35% fessed up that they haven't the foggiest.

Utilization rates mirror the way users track resources (or don't, as the case may be). A sizable minority (23%) uses a commercial tool, about half (47%) track resources manually, and again, a full 30% don't track storage at all.

How do you figure storage consumption?

This was first published in July 2002

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