In the elliptically named Cost of Storage Often a Poor Justifier for Investment Ferris Research performs a simple comparison of low-cost RAID 5 to what they call medium-cost RAID 5 for backing up corporate messaging systems. The bottom line: costs range from “$1.60 to $22 per Gigabyte”.
Ferris’ point is that users shouldn’t be too quick to assume that disk storage has to be costly, a sentiment StorageMojo.com seconds. And for backup purposes, using the 25x backup data compression offered by several companies would make it even more affordable.
More and more folks are tumbling to the fact that storage prices could be way lower than they seem to be today. Perhaps someday soon a big storage company that has been fighting “commoditization” will embrace it and drive several competitors into the ground.
Hi Robin:
Perhaps sometime soon, a consumer electronics company will make storage a commodity, and the technology will be adapted to the enterprise as a low cost alternative. Although the http://www.openfiler.com/ & http://www.freenas.org/ might be a starting points for a new venture also.
I think it is very hard for a company that has a high cost of sales, to adapt to the low cost model of a commodity sales company.
Keep up the good work, you are asking the right questions.
Increasing Storage capacity, whether individually or for the Enterprise,
has the same result. It raises TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). There are
the obvious costs such as initial purchase price and installation. It is the
infrastructure “hidden” costs that are hard to find.
To get a rough number for these “hidden” costs, I have a concept called
“The Speed Limit of the Information Universe”. The “Speed Limit” in any
shop is a function of the TCO of the infrastructure. Basically the size of
your IT wallet.
If you have mapped the “Speed Limit” of your shop you can use it to accurately calculate the Storage cost.
An example would be, you need a “Speed Limit” of 1 TB/hour (Terabyte
per hour) to deliver your Managed Units of Information to requestors
with Information High Availability, and to satisfy the Information Integrity
and Disaster Recovery requirements for the Managed Units of Information.
One TB/hour is very expensive. 1 TB is 300 MBps (Megabytes per second).
Most shops have less than 100 GB/hour (~30 MBps) for a usable
“Speed Limit”. This is because the bandwidth of the “endpoint” devices
(disk, tape) is slow. Until Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet the network was
slow.
An example is, when you raise your Storage capacity from 2 MB to 2 GB
per individual your Enterprise “Speed Limit” has to go up to accommodate
the incremental Storage increase. The 2 MB to 2 GB Storage increase is 10x10x10 or three orders of magnitude increase.
If the “Speed Limit” is a linear relationship then the 100 GB “Speed Limit”
would have to increase by more than 10x10x10 or 1000×100 GB to
more than 100 TB/hour from 1 TB/hour. Very expensive!
A “Search Engine” shop like Google is the reverse of this case. Google has
to have an incredible internal bandwidth to deliver Search Request Information in a timely manner. Since they were having to buy much larger areal density drives out of necessity, they had surplus capacity. Very innovative and ingenious use.