Information Technology Data Cycle

I. Storage holds Data
In the same way that carbon dioxide is captured and becomes part of natural resources, Business data is captured and becomes part of storage systems.

Data can be seen as a non-wanted result of business activity: besides the fact that primary goal of a business is to make money it also results in the production and proliferation of data ("data emission"), which, following to the "Information Technology Data Cycle" (ITDC), is captured in storage systems. In the same way a musician will create musique from noise, a businesse will create Information from accumulated data

One way of measuring a business efficiency, is Return-On-Investment calculation: assessing the value created from the investments. One way of adding value into a business is to create new products and services out of various sources like, for example, published market intelligence reports or analysis of historical data on sales and customer behavior. In other words, a business creates many financial reports, like sales performance, consumer spending trends or other statistics, so to make a new meaning from all data accumulated over the course of its activity. Finally, every data being potentially a valuable asset, a corporate must preserve it all.

Without a doubt, every business emit data, all of which must be kept, as it can potentially generate extra value by extracting Information out of it. On the other hand, excess of information can lead to inefficient decision making, hence a loss of business agility.

In the same manner as energy, Storage is a limited resource. We propose an approach to storage management that is as natural as managing energy nowadays: invest in efficient technologies in-line with defined targets

II. Storage types

2) Business critical storage: Tier-1
no consumable parts
short life time (4-5 years)
forklift upgrade
high electrical power
high cooling power
Goal: running business critical services

High-End spec storage for business critical applications. Transactional workloads is prime targets. No-downtime allowed. Made out of specialized storage controllers, fully redundant and maintained without disruption.
Production lifetime is 4 to 5 years on average. Hardware upgrades are forklift, due to specialized storage controllers. High manufacturing quality control

2) General Purpose Storage: Tier-2
High performance, high available storage repositories aiming mainly at non business critical applications, while offering storage for transactional workloads.
Build out of general purpose components, in order to maintain a low price/GB.
price is up to 1/3 of Tier-1, for same performance. Expect possible downtime during some maintenance windows. Quality control is lesser than on Tier-1
Lifetime is equivalent to Tier-1 (4-5 years on average). Hardware upgrades are components basis (modular upgrades)

3) Capacity oriented storage: Tier-3
Made partly from consumable parts (such as tapes/cartridges..)
long life time (up to 20 years)
very low power requirements
very low heat emission

Mixed storage systems: tapes+disks, in order to propose very large storage repository while maintaining performance in-line with expectations. Price/GB half of Tier-2.
High upgrade level (software and hardware) and long production life expectancy: 4 to 5 times longer than Tier-2 and Tier-3. Migration is is an important process and must be made possible without vendor lock-in (adoption to storage standards is mandatory, opensource is a guarantee). This tier is aiming at offering very large storage for both long term storage and large filesystems storage, while making sure customer controls its data


III. Storage Performance Characteristics

SPC-1
SPC-2
MTTDL, MTBF

IV. Storage Efficiency Characteristics

Price per unit of storage ($/GB)
Watts per unit of storage (W/GB)
FRU per unit of storage (#FRU/TB)
Lifetime per unit of storage
Maximum/minimum storage capacity
Usable vs Raw storage ratio