Determining the costs of a SAN

Determining the costs of a SAN

Christopher Poelker

What is the cost of a SAN system in the range of 2 to 20 TB?

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Hey, I'm a technologist, not a sales guy. Anyway, price depends greatly on what the SAN can do and the class of components you use. For example, director class switches vs. "edge" class switches, modular vs monolithic storage, ATA or SCSI disks rather than dual ported fibre disks, etc.

After considering the hardware components, you need to think about the software, professional services purchased, data protection environment, and things like that. A SAN purchase is not just disk storage, it's usually a complete solution that solves a business problem. The type of problem being solved will affect the total cost of the solution.

Gartner and the Enterprise Storage Group put out papers on storage costs, and I think the last one I saw showed costs in the range of a penny per megabyte to fifty cents per megabyte, depending on what the SAN does.

Sorry for the "consultant" type of answer, but in this case, it really does depend on many factors.

Chris

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This was first published in November 2003

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