Cost of storage calculator?

Hi,
I am trying to come up with a calculator that lets me compute the cost
of storage per terabyte of data stored.

I have a 3 tier system (with various vendors) with a primary -
secondary - tape backup architecture

My goal is to see which vendor combinations are providing me the least
cost of storage.

I would like to know what factors to consider in creating my
calculator.

For example, even a simple list of items to consider will help. An
example list would be:
1. Disks
2. Ports on the switches
3. Licenses for each TB managed by the filer

and so on.

Also, it would help if someone can give me typical numbers to expect
for each item... for example, how much would one normally pay someone
like EMC for each TB stored... how do port costs work etc...

I really appreciate any help

/l

On 5 Apr 2006 23:03:25 -0700, wrote:

Hi,
I am trying to come up with a calculator that lets me compute the cost
of storage per terabyte of data stored.

I have a 3 tier system (with various vendors) with a primary -
secondary - tape backup architecture

My goal is to see which vendor combinations are providing me the least
cost of storage.

I would like to know what factors to consider in creating my
calculator.

For example, even a simple list of items to consider will help. An
example list would be:
1. Disks
2. Ports on the switches
3. Licenses for each TB managed by the filer

and so on.

Also, it would help if someone can give me typical numbers to expect
for each item... for example, how much would one normally pay someone
like EMC for each TB stored... how do port costs work etc...

I really appreciate any help

/l


Non-acquisition costs are company specific. How much do you pay for
power? How much do you pay admins to manage this storage? Backup
admins to back it up? How much do you pay for tape and drives and
libraries? Do you have a factor for data center space per rack u?
Per cubic foot? etc.

As you can see there are numerous factors involved, it just depends
how deep you want to go.

Acquisition costs also vary greatly by customer. Company X may be
purchasing in round lots of 10TB a shot, while company Y may be
purchasing at 1TB a shot. Discounts will differ. This applies to
switch ports, management software, etc.

There is no industry calculator, but once you have all of your
specific variables you have a company specific calculator.

For me the cost of storage comes to about US$60/GB/year. But my
inputs will likely be different from yours.

~F

wrote:
Hi,
I am trying to come up with a calculator that lets me compute the cost
of storage per terabyte of data stored.

I have a 3 tier system (with various vendors) with a primary -
secondary - tape backup architecture

My goal is to see which vendor combinations are providing me the least
cost of storage.

I would like to know what factors to consider in creating my
calculator.

For example, even a simple list of items to consider will help. An
example list would be:
1. Disks
2. Ports on the switches
3. Licenses for each TB managed by the filer

and so on.

Also, it would help if someone can give me typical numbers to expect
for each item... for example, how much would one normally pay someone
like EMC for each TB stored... how do port costs work etc...

I really appreciate any help

/l

Have you talked to someone in your company's accounting department?

This seems perfect for a little spreadsheet modelling.

HTH,
ed

Hi Faeandar... thats a good question... we have about 1TB of data and
we do have a datacenter. We are projecting that the growth will be
rapid this year and will be going to 10TB by the end of the year
because of an acquisition.

I am not sure how much we pay for power and space, but I will most
likely have to relocate the new storage to a different part of teh
building to make room...

Taking realestate and power out of the equasion, can you help me with
some ways of sizing the price? My question may be more basic than you
think... I am naive and even new to what the pricing models on a NetApp
filer may look like... how would I go about buying 10TB of space from
them? Do they license per terabyte?

/l

Faeandar ... your reply helped a lot... let me ask some more questions
on your deployment though... when you say $80 per GB... is that just
the disk cost or fully loaded (cost including your disk array, licenses
etc)?

Also, if you had to add another TB in your storage, would it just total
cost $800?

Also, given storage proces keep reducing, how much do you think the
same GB will cost next year?

/l

Sorry, I meant to say... at $60/GB right now ,would you expect to pay
$60,000 per TB?

Also, what rate of decline do you expect on that... what do you expect
to pay per GB next year and per TB next year?

/l

writes:
Sorry, I meant to say... at $60/GB right now ,would you expect to pay
$60,000 per TB?

I don't understand this. 500 GB SATA drives are about $300 each at
newegg.com, 1000x cheaper than $60/GB. Of course you want to use
enterprise drives that are maybe $3 per GB instead of $.60/GB, but
that's still a huge ratio even after you add all the RAID and NAS
stuff. What's going on?

I have the same confusion when I started this project... I am guessing
it is the license cost we have to pay EMC and NetApp etc? Maybe other
hardware expenses? You need sometihng to plug the drive into
afterall...

/l

wrote:
I have the same confusion when I started this project... I am guessing
it is the license cost we have to pay EMC and NetApp etc? Maybe other
hardware expenses? You need sometihng to plug the drive into
afterall...

The key to the answer is that the cost was expressed per GB *per year*.
One can probably buy a pretty decent storage system for well under
$10/GB these days, but the purchase cost typically represents only a
small fraction of the overall expenditu management costs are usually
ballparked at something like 5x - 7x the purchase cost (likely including
license costs but possibly not service costs), and license and service
agreement costs can easily more than double the raw hardware cost over
the life of the product.

- bill

Awesome Bill... thanks for that answer.... I find this to be a common
confusion for newbiews like myself... we tend to automatically just
pencil in the cost of the harddrive and then find our forecast very
screwed up.