Wireless chip manufacturer Qualcomm expects to halve its storage
capacity growth next year, thanks to a utilisation tool from
MonoSphere. With 1.2
petabytes already on the floor, this piece
of software has been critical, according to Qualcomm's chief
information officer, Norm Fjeldheim.
In six months of using MonoSphere's Storage Horizon
capacity planning software, Qualcomm has
reduced its storage growth by 67%, and next year it expects to
drop down to half its existing growth rate of 100% annually. The
company declined to say how much this translates to in dollar
terms.
"Each chip generates about a terabyte (TB) of data," according
to Fjeldheim and with expanding products lines, a growing employee
base and more international locations, Qualcomm's storage growth is
exploding.
Conversely, its storage utilisation rates have been poor. At its
lowest point, the firm was down to 40% utilisation and its highest
point was 62%. "Our goal is to average between 70% to 80%
utilisation," Fjeldheim noted.
Qualcomm's databases and business applications run on a Hitachi
Data Systems (HDS)
storage area network (SAN), which accounts
for about 30% of the storage on the floor. The rest is
network attached storage (NAS) from Network
Appliance (NetApp), which holds all the engineering data.
Qualcomm has some direct-attached gear but is gradually
migrating off this. During this migration process, the firm
discovered MonoSphere, which three years ago was building a
storage virtualisation product.
By September 2005, however, MonoSphere had scrapped this effort
as no one was buying virtualisation software, and it built a
capacity planning tool instead. "We stuck with them as we liked
what they were trying to do," said Matt Clark, IT manager for
corporate host services at Qualcomm.
With Storage Horizon, Clark said the company is able to track
how its storage is being used and who is using it. "Our engineers
often say they need more storage but we are able to better predict
what their needs are and what they still have," he said. It helps
to get financial approval on purchases, too, according to
Fjeldheim.
"Engineers doesn't like going through the financial
justification process so they ask for more than they need, but this
gets expensive," he said. Now he is able to show them a demand
curve and in turn show the finance department that engineering
really does need another 3 TBs, for example. "Finance signs off on
it as they see we are managing it better," Fjeldheim said.
Buying from a startup
Fjeldheim said it's his personal preference never to buy from a
new supplier, but none of Qualcomm's existing suppliers, including
Symantec on the backup side, had what it needed. He'd like to see
MonoSphere add support for capacity usage by application, instead
of just business unit, so that he can go to the application users
and vary their storage allowance. Tighter integration with
LDAP would also be beneficial to measure
capacity by user. "And if they could tie in with backup and
recovery, we could get a whole picture of our storage
environment," Clark added.
Fjeldheim concluded, "my gut tells me we've already paid for the
product" by saving on the amount of storage it would've had to buy,
had it not been using MonoSphere's product.
Most
storage resource management (SRM) tools take
a stab at capacity planning, and the key suppliers here are HP
with its AppIQ products and change management software supplier,
Onaro. Monitoring applications from ServerGraph, TekTools, Wysdm
Software, Bocada Software also address this problem.