TCO
Reinvented
Copyright IBM Corporation 2009
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Introduction
A high-
end storage system’s total cost of ownership (TCO) is like an iceberg: the vast
majority of costs are hidden from view. Comparing systems by looking at obvious factors,
like capacity and box price, may be easier. But taking a fuller look at the factors impacting
IT budgets over a system’s lifetime will yield a more accurate TCO assessment and,
ultimately, a more informed decision as to which system is truly more favorable to the
company's bottom line.
The chart below shows a fuller set of storage array cost factors and their generally
recognized relative impact on a system’s overall cost.*
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Figure 1: Typical TCO costs of enterprise storage arrays
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In “
Governance Dashboard for Enterprise Storage
” (
Information Management Magazine
, May 2006), Dick
Benton of GlassHouse Technologies Inc. notes that Gartner and Forrester attribute as much as 60-70% of
overall storage TCO to the Administration factor. This large figure likely comes from grouping Administration
together with Backup/Restore and other cost factor categories. Here, we break them out separately.
