18 George Crump from Storage Switzerland, back in January, wrote an article about the True Cost of Storage that clearly stated how to really calculate one’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when it comes to Storage. Through all our discussions about storage with prospects and customers, we realized that the real, hard cost of storage was not always well calculated, and pretty elusive to the IT managers. It was made even more obvious when comparing to the new types of Storage available to customers, especially Cloud Storage since the models, both economic and technical, were quite different. Hard Cost of Storage There have been claims about TCO by vendors, analysts and IT managers that were somewhat forged to basically say whatever the sponsor of the study wanted to say, which is part of the game, obviously. In December 2011, Scality made its own study on total, hard cost of storage, and really tried to be as objective as possible. To do so, we used numbers from different analysts (including Forrester’s Andrew Reichmann, in a study with the opposite conclusion to ours) and customers/prospects/friends in the storage/datacenter/ops industry to take into account core costs (disk, drives, servers) but also rack space, cooling, power, operational costs etc. We honestly believe we made a good attempt at being as objective as possible, and we even put those numbers to the test of a panel in December 2011 at Cloudbeat with other storage vendors, and later on with analysts, vendors, partners and prospects since then with quite some success. We continue to update the model when we find something that is skewed, unrealistic or simply wrong, to keep with our vow to make this model as honest as can be. If you want to hear about it, please let me know, I can send you the information. To get back to Storage Switzerland, the article explained in detail what should be included in a true, total cost of storage for IT managers. Backups, archives, capacity planning and DR are things that are not incorporated but, which should be compared to newer storage systems that manage this in a completely different way, most of the times transparently. We’re happy to see that this article has made it to the top 10 (ranked at #6) [external page no longer active] of the most viewed articles on Storage Switzerland, a must-read site for everything storage related. Congrats George and the team at Storage Switzerland.
