Software-Defined Data Centers Might Cost Companies More Than They Save 173
storagedude writes "As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less. That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used. The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues."
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that a TB of enterprise class storage (and backup) isn't $100.
Re:IT the bottleneck? (Score:5, Informative)
Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?
No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
Companies want to see the big Netapp or EMC name on the array so they can trust that the manufacturer knows what they are doing enough that their data is safe. Amazon and Google can get away with using cheap commodity hardware because they *are* the big name, and people trust that they can keep their data safe, so they don't need to turn around and buy hardware from the big storage vendors.
Are cloud providers really much cheaper? An entry level Netapp FAS2240 with 12TB of disk costs around $16K [computerworld.com]
Amazon charges $0.095/GB/month, or $1140/month for 12TB. So after 14 months on Amazon, you could have bought a local array.
You still have to back up (or replicate) the data from the local array, so that's not a true apples-to-apples comparison (assuming that you trust S3 enough that you don't keep your own backup of the data). a 12TB array is pretty small so you don't get much economy of scale, so once you get into the larger arrays with 100's of TB, I think the numbers swing farther away from S3 for corporate storage.