Therefore, the server rooms are beginning to take the physical appearance of the Library of Congress, substitute the rows of book shelves with rows of server racks. In the typical library, how many texts cover the same subject and occupy their own space on the shelf? What is the value of that small piece of book shelf real estate? In the server room, how many files are duplicated by dozens or thousands of users that occupy discriminate disk space. How much of that disk space is managed to ensure that “a gigabyte allocated is a gigabyte used”? If the library book had a title page and 1 thousands pages of blank paper, that is certainly an understandable and easily recognized waste of shelf space. If a user is allocated a gigabyte of space and only uses 100MB, again there’s a waste of space. How do these examples correlate? I, we, can easily see the blank pages of a book do not require any management or technical tools to recognize there’s a problem. Unused or wasted disk storage space requires resources to manage to ensure we are correctly resourced.

This is where growth in IT infrastructure explodes. As a culture, we don’t manage digital storage efficiently. Our solution is to add more and manage less. Contributing to this is the growing application based world and early virtualization technology did not solve that problem. Virtualization still makes good on the promise to collapse hardware, but to what degree is based on the ability to consolidate software and other data? That gets a little bit into virtual desktops and that technology still out on the horizon.