Premium Content

Access "Determining the real cost of storage"

Jeff Boles, Contributor Published: 13 Oct 2012
Finding a home for Flash

This article is part of the March 2012 issue of Finding a home for Flash

Vendors tout dollars per gigabyte per I/O, but figuring out what a data storage system will really cost your company is a much more complicated process. If your job involves storing data, you already know storage eats up budget dollars faster than just about anything else in IT. But as daily practitioners, we rarely notice just how many bucks storage is truly consuming. The marketing hype for data storage products stays focused on magic bullets like “more capacity per dollar” or “more I/O per dollar,” but the cost of storage is about more than that. One of the best ways to consider the true cost of storage is to think about what’s required to store a single piece of data over its entire lifetime. This is called the “lifecycle cost of data storage,” and it includes the technologies, processes and workflows across all types of storage. This type of bottom-up look at storing a piece of data over a period of time not only helps us understand what data storage truly costs, but helps us determine what we should be looking for when we’re shopping for data storage ... Access >>>

Access TechTarget
Premium Content for Free.

By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy

Already a member? Login to access this content.

What's Inside

Features
    • Enterprise flash: Three implementation options for virtualisation by Manek Dubash

      Enterprise flash now comes in a variety of form factors aimed at speeding I/O beyond what’s possible with spinning disk in server and desktop virtualisation scenarios.

    • Determining the real cost of storage by Jeff Boles, Contributor

      Vendors tout dollars per gigabyte per I/O, but figuring out what a data storage system will really cost your company is a much more complicated process.

    • “Big data” conspiracy theories abound by Rich Castagna, Editorial Director

      Could the latest and greatest buzzword in the storage biz be killing off some of the most useful storage technologies around?

    • Storage networking alternatives by Dennis Martin

      All the old standards -- FC, iSCSI and NAS -- are still going strong, but FCoE and virtualized I/O are waiting in the wings to help remake our storage networks.

    • Status report: Solid-state storage by Phil Goodwin, Contributor

      Solid-state storage has carved out a niche in the storage ecosystem, establishing itself as a viable alternative for high-performance applications.

    • Occupy Storage! by Jon William Toigo

      Data storage technologies keep getting better, but storage vendors may just be up to their old tricks.

    • Cloud backup is ready for the enterprise by Jacob Gsoedl, Contributor

      Cloud backup services have seen increased adoption by SMBs, but with a choice of methods and tighter controls, cloud backup is now also a viable enterprise alternative.

More Premium Content Accessible For Free

Back to top