Friday, May 18, 2012

Dr. Pangloss' Notes From Dinner

The renowned Dr. Pangloss greatly enjoyed last night's inaugural dinner of the Storage Valley Supper Club, networking with storage industry luminaries, discussing the storage technology roadmap, projecting the storage market, and appreciating the venue. He kindly agreed to share his notes, which I have taken the liberty of elaborating slightly.
  • The following argument was made. The average value to be obtained from a byte you don't keep is guaranteed to be zero. The average cost of not keeping the byte is guaranteed to be zero. Thus the net average value added by not keeping a byte is guaranteed to be zero. But the average value to be obtained from a byte you keep is guaranteed to be greater than zero. The average cost of keeping the byte is guaranteed to be zero. Thus the net average value added by keeping a byte is guaranteed to be greater than zero. So we should keep everything. Happy days for the industry!
  • The following numbers were quoted. The number of bytes to be stored is growing at 60%/yr. The cost of storing a byte is growing at -20%. Thus the total cost of storage is growing at 60-20=40 (100+60)*(100-20)=128%/yr. And IT budgets are growing 4% a year. Happy days for the industry!
Tip of the hat to Jim Handy for correcting my math.

1 comment:

David. said...

It turns out that my esteemed friend Dr. Pangloss' information as to the growth of IT budgets was out of date. According to this 2012 survey the growth of IT budgets in recent years was:

2008 4.0%
2009 0%
2010 0%
2011 2.0%
2012 2.2%

Nevertheless, the good doctor assures me that there is plenty of room in the budget for a 128%/yr increase in storage costs.