Storage TCO: Intangible Cost Factors
When comparing enterprise storage systems with regard to cost, it’s only human to dwell on the easier, concrete metrics, like box price, features, and capacity. But there are other, less measurable factors sailing in under the radar that may leave you with a system that’s cheap on paper but expensive in practice.
And here are those factors, in increasing order of measuring difficulty: Time, Effective Capacity, and Responsiveness.
Time. The time a storage administrator team spends maintaining and tweaking a system for required performance and service levels is an expense commonly acknowledged but hard to factor in. You may not consider it a component of system cost since you pay your staff’s salaries no matter what tasks they carry out or how long the tasks take.
But is this true? If it takes hours to provision new volumes, resize existing volumes, make backups, and perform other management tasks, then the associated people resources are unavailable for assignments that could otherwise contribute to enterprise profitability. A system with high demands on administrator time is a costly system.
Effective Capacity. TBs are easy to price, but let’s look more critically at your organization’s capacity demands. Is that targeted 150 TB really necessary or is it actually to over-compensate for a capacity-guzzling system and to accommodate traditional storage management practices? Are you using or contemplating a system that will require “excess” capacity that might not be used for years – to cover for uncertainty due to scaling limitations? Will the system cause you to order new capacity when, in fact, pockets of unused capacity go untouched because they require too much administrator time to reclaim?
Another thought to consider: Is your capacity target, in actuality, inflated to compensate for features that miss the mark, such as capacity-consuming full copies rather than differential snapshots or effective thin provisioning? A system that guzzles capacity or requires the IT organization to overload on capacity is a costly system.
Responsiveness. Try to put a price on the cost to your organization of slowed storage services. In the best of all worlds, the IT center is the ultimate enabler, not hindrance, letting business activities flow and allowing every department to get its work done. When comparing systems for cost, take the time to consider what mechanisms the system offers to help administrators optimize responsiveness. For example, how long does the system take to provision a new volume? Does it provide extra snapshots so your development organization can do more testing? Does it provide flexible and frequent enough logical backups to ensure that you can roll back the data in case of a logical error? Do such options involve so much storage overhead as to potentially limit your ability to even offer them?
Consider, also, the system’s lead time in responding to user requests. For example, how long does it take the system to resize a volume? Imagine a different reality, in which a storage administrator – or even more junior IT team member – can provision storage at will, in a data-safe, virtualized environment.
If these activities will take too long – and how much time is “too long” is a fuzzy metric to assess for cost but not insignificant at all – then that system may literally slow down your organization, causing individuals and departments to be less efficient and perhaps even miss business opportunities. In short, that’s a system that may cost the company money. This is pretty ironic, given that if there’s any one industry that’s added speed – and at lowered costs – to the 21st century business environment, it’s IT. A system that hampers IT responsiveness is a costly system.
In short, how much are these intangible “assets” worth to you? If they’re missing in a system, how much might their absence cost your department and even the enterprise?
Avoid the trap: When comparing two storage systems, don’t fall prey to evaluating only the metrics that stare you in the face and measure easily. Do all you can to explore the less tangible cost factors. The results may surprise you.
We know we promised some time back to drill down into SATA vs FC reliability … stay tuned, we have that one queued up for two weeks from now…