The price of storage

| 1 Comment
I've had cause to do the math lately, which I'll spare you :). But as of the best numbers I have, the cost of 1GB of space on the EVA6100 is about $16.22. Probably more, since this 6100 was created out of the carcass of an EVA3000, and I don't know what percentage of parts from the old 3000 are still in the 6100 and thus can't apportion the costs right.

For the EVA4400, which we have filled with FATA drives, the cost is $3.03.

Suddenly, the case for Dynamic Storage Technology (formerly known as Shadow Volumes) in OES can be made in economic terms. Yowza.

The above numbers do not include backup rotation costs. Those costs can vary from $3/GB to $15/GB depending on what you're doing with the data in the backup rotation.

Why is the cost of the EVA6100 so much greater than the EVA4400?
  1. The EVA6100 uses 10K RPM 300GB FibreChannel disks, where the the EVA4400 uses 7.2K RPM 1TB (or is it 450GB?) FATA drives. The cost-per-gig on FC is vastly higher than it is on fibre-ATA.
  2. Most of the drives in the EVA6100 were purchased back when 300GB FC drives cost over $2000 each.
  3. The EVA6100 controller and cabinets just plain cost more than the EVA4400, because it can expand farther.
To put it into a bit of perspective, lets take the example of a 1TB volume of, "unorganized file data", the seemingly official term for "file-server". If you place that 1TB of data on the EVA6100, that data consumes $16609.28 worth of storage. So what if 70% of that data hasn't been modified in a year (not unreasonable), and is then put on the EVA4400 instead? So you'd have 307GB on the 6100 and 717GB on the 4400. Your storage cost now drops to $5909.75. That's real money.

1 Comment

this made the cool solutions feed this morning