Internal Costs Per Gigabyte — What Do You Pay? 420
CodePwned writes "I recently took over a position at a rather large company where I discovered my group was paying $30 per gigabyte per month! That's $360 per year per gigabyte to our own IT department. While I understand costs are different depending on the scale, redundancy, backup and support methods, there doesn't seem to be any good papers on what range you should expect your costs to be. So far, my research shows an average of $1 per gigabyte or less for internally hosted space. What do you pay?"
Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bandwidth? Storage? Backup? Downloads from a particular site? What the hell are we talking about here?
I thought it was RAM (Score:4, Funny)
I thought it was RAM
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Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
He's at a large company, where one department (IT) actually charges other departments (sales, development) for services. He wants to know what he should expect to be charged by IT per GB of storage. He thinks the IT department at his company is overpricing to provide for Aeron chairs.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interenal invoicing is just causing a lot more overhead in an organization making it move slower and be less responsive to changes.
Managers will just sit down and fight about internal costs instead of heading forward.
$30 seems to be very high too, but the important thing is also what do you get for it?
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
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Well if he works for sales and knows about price per GB and the IT department managed to sell 1gb for 30$ per month, maybe they should switch jobs....
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His IT department wouldn't see fit to sit on a USED Aeron. What are they, animals?
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's as vague as everyone is making it to be. Since his department is paying the IT department it most likely means data on a windows network through CIFS that is backed up and redundant. This is a common thing.
If you are having to speculate based on what is likely and common, then it fits the very definition of "vague".
transaction periscope (Score:3, Insightful)
Another great way to muddy the waters is to misconstrue the question. You don't have to speculate. There's a difference between a vague question and casting a wide net. The transaction value of a single post is maximized in providing a specific answer to a specific question, whereas the transactional value of a discussion forum is maximized by having many situations and specifics put forward, in
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I think it's hardly vague given his post contained terms like redundancy, backup and internally hosted space. Not sure but I think "internally hosted space" was the givaway...
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the point, the point is that you can buy a consumer grade hard disk for $0.05/GB.
A 1TB consumer-grade HDD costs $50. $1/GB per month would mean $12,000 per year to store that. His employer is spending $360,000 to store that same amount of information. This is clearly far beyond the "consumer pricing has no bearing on enterprise pricing" argument.
I don't think that more than one third of a million dollars can be justified to store one terabyte of data, no matter what the infrastructure involved. At that price, you can afford to colocate one hundred servers in one hundred different datacenters and replicate your data to all of them, including the staff to manage them all. $360k per year to store 1TB is insanity.
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Assuming we're talking about storage, which we might not be...who knows?
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> $360k per year to store 1TB is insanity.
Actually, the fact that this is happening in a private company and not in a public entity is the surprising thing...
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You've been suckered into believing that private enterprise is smarter and more efficient than government, when in fact both can be equally staggeringly incompetent!
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And that's just for one location. If this storage includes multiple datacenters, they would have to h
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Good god, they have to hire 4 people to manage each GB of storage? They must be employing hundreds of thousands of IT workers!
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Apologies, that should have been TB, but still ... that's 4 people per pair of enterprise hard drives. :-)
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My guess is that at some point (back when mailboxes had a 3MB limit or whatever) during some cutback someone decided that storing too many files is a good target for a push to conserve resources, so they had the brilliant idea of jacking up prices to get departments to use less. The very idea of conserving space as if it's some limited resource is so ludicrous that I can barely type it, but it's also very believable in an office setting.
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The last SAN I bought was about $40k for about 4TB (it was several years ago) It was cheap, iSCSI and 250GB SATA drives.. That did not include any other facilities overhead, networking equipment (it was iSCSI) and only gave us 2TB of actual use, since they were two mirrored systems. That right there would be closer to $20/GB (or $10/GB of non-redundant storage). then, after the second year, we had to pay support contracts to keep things running, and figured a 5 year life for the system. That price also
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Actual cost for employees is probably higher (after benefits and such), I usually 2x actual salary. That total comes out to about $1M. 150K for a SAN will you get about 10T of usable storage. That comes out to about $100/year/GB. If spread these costs out a bit:
Capitol costs for server equipment:
150+20+80+200 = $450K
Operating costs:
Rack space (1 rack @ $1500/month x 36 months) = $54K
Vendor service contracts (10% of equipment cost per year) 45 x 3 = $135K
Support staff ($200K for 2 senior, 100K for 2 juni
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair point, but now add some time from:
1. One audit group to ensure system continues to conform to spec.
2. One test team to ensure all that backup stuff actually can restore according to SLAs.
3. One legal/management group to ensure SOX compliance each quarter.
4. One capacity planning group to track/handle trends and headroom.
5. One data center build team to bring new farms online as needed.
6. One decom team to manage end-of-line for obsolete resources.
7. One architecture team to either spread your vision or show you how you're doing it wrong.
8. Ten other groups you've never heard of doing things you think you don't need.
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And people who are saying "we don't know if it's storage" what else could "internally hosted space" mean? As the parent points out, even if we are talking about extremely enhanced services, the price is preposterous.
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I bet you anything it's not really $360,000 a year to store a terabyte of data.
It's probably closer to $10,000 or so a year to store a terabyte of data (this is enterprise class stuff, right?), and $350,000 a year towards unfunded IT mandates, like "We need Windows 7 on every machine! And Office 2010! And Project and Visio for everyone! And...."
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) He isn't paying for today's 1TB. He's paying the loan IT took out to integrate a system to provide 1TB in 2005 across who knows how many platforms probably including wonderful legacy applications from 1982 written in COBOL.
Think about the way that would work. IT buys the hardware but you don't pay penny one at that point. They set up the service and start charging you. Hopefully they forecast demand well and don't buy too much extra, but that hardware, setup cost, maintenance, integration, forecasting and everything else is a big lump in month one that you pay back over time in monthly charges. Two years down the line you are still paying for the initial cost even if going out and buying it new would cost only a fraction. Too bad about that, if you didn't need the capacity blame the forecasters or (probably) business people who provided data for the forecast basis.
2) The charge that says "per GB" is not necessarily for storage. It's a proxy for it and it probably includes it, but charge back systems always include compromises about which services are packaged, which costs are shared across multiple charge items and who is using or owns the underlying assets. If you really want to know what the cost should be you have two possibilities: yell at the IT management until they provide you a special charge rate of assets specific to your department or yell at the IT accountant support until they cough up the entire IT budget and chargeback methodology. Both are nearly impossible.
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He's paying the loan IT took out to integrate a system to provide 1TB in 2005 across who knows how many platforms probably including wonderful legacy applications from 1982 written in COBOL.
Yeah, but both programs and data from almost 30 years ago would have exceptionally small- if not negligible- storage requirements by modern standards, so those likely aren't adding much to the total.
Re:Gigabytes of Pr0n, maybe? (Score:5, Funny)
Full service IT at it's best.
Apostrophe usage at its worst.
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IT all depends (Score:5, Insightful)
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"For the last time, close that browser and get the @#$%%#$ rack installed before leave today!"
Performance, reliability, and price, pick two. (Score:5, Interesting)
High performance and reliable storage tends to be expensive.
High performance and cheap tends to require a lot of maintenance.
Reliable and cheap tends to be really really slow.
So if they are on a SAN with that one gig spread across 50 drives, there are some applications that need that speed.
Re:Performance, reliability, and price, pick two. (Score:5, Insightful)
At those costs, one terabyte of data stored for three years would cost roughly $1.1 million. I find it hard to believe that you could legitimately build a SAN that stored 1 TB for that amount of money and not have hit some sort of performance wall that made the expense superfluous. I mean, at some point, you're maxing out multiple 10GigE fibre channels from your SAN and thinking "How can I spend the rest of this money?"
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Well, you can start with probably $400k to pay salary and benefits to the guy who maintains it for 3 years, plus equipments costs, plus backup solution, network, physical premisis, insurance, power, HVAC, UPS. Plus you want high availability, then double pretty much everything.
$3/Gb/Month (Score:2, Informative)
$3/Gb/Month
WTF? (Score:2)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
If it's internal why would you have to pay per year for that?
The 30lb bags of Purina IT Chow are a recurring cost.
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Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
"Internal" in the question refers (very obtusely) to the cost within a company. In other words, $X per gigabyte is taken from his department's budget in order to "pay" for their IT use.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We fight with this type of stuff all the time. The market price for things and the amount IT "charges" for the same thing can be way out of line. What I usually see is some large infrastructure investment by IT gets broken up and tacked onto other services charged to the departments that depend on them. Your TB drive may cost $100 but it may be in a high end raid on a server with some fault tolerance attached to a UPS ran by a full team of support. The company can either cover the cost of IT or hand it
Costs for what? (Score:5, Informative)
For backed up to tape storage? Storage replicated to another, remote datacenter? Snapshotted at regular intervals?
SAN storage? NAS? Direct attach? On arrays with 10 drives, 100 drives, or 1000 drives?
Fast SAS or FC drives? SATA arrays? 5400 RPM? 7200? 10k? 15k?
If you're paying $360/GB/yr for low end storage that sucks. For very high end, with replication and snapshots and the fastest drives and so forth, that's pretty high, but not an order of magnitude high.
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Not to mention you are also paying the salary for a full time employee+on call. Figure with taxes and benies, and depending on your local cost of living, a decent network tech can run a company $100k/year. And if you're running a smaller SAN with say 10 terabytes of storage that's $10/GB right there.
-Rick
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It's possible that if the poster is finding the cost outrageous, it's because his teams needs don't align super "super fast, super reliable, super awesome" storage. Perhaps he needs to beg IT to also offer a slower, cheaper option. Or perhaps they do and he's whiner .
Too generic a question. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Depends" is your answer. Though I'm assuming you're talking about disk, not tape nor VTL. Do you buy direct from the manufacturer or through a channel? How big is your company? What's the total installed base so far? General Electric pays much less per GB than some midsize company with 100TB.
Do you mean for SATA disk in a tier2 array or SSD in a tier1 array?
Costs go up when you include snapshots and replication.
Do the editors even ask the submitter to be more specific?
$40 (Score:4, Interesting)
We pay a one time $40 per gigabyte as the capital cost of acquiring the storage. There is no monthly cost. I think $40 is still way too much.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No monthly cost to our group. Once its bought, the ongoing operations cost comes out of someone else's budget.
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I don't pay (Score:4, Insightful)
My boss does.
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The only 'insightful' comment so far, and me without mod points - your department pays whatever your boss has agreed to pay. Why should it even worry you...? $30 a month is background noise compared to the cost of running a 'department'.
(PS: The OP didn't even say what he's paying for so I don't see what other people are commenting on...)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Two kids are fighting over a pie, on says we should each get half and the other says I want it all. Mother intervenes, and after discussing it with the children, the one who wanted half get a quarter of the pie and the child who demanded it all, gets 3/4 of the pie.
That's how most companies handle accounting.
Because the are run by salespeople... (my addition)
One idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
Stop beeing retards and do internal invoicing. Not like the board of directors is billing "per decision". IT department as a billing self ruling department is so damn stupid. And no one seem to understand it. It is like having a fire department only going to fires that is in line with their mission statement.
And having an it department invocing per GB instead of having a budget for storage and then the company can allocate it as they please. And if someone has a bigger need, it should be a question for the company. Not a matter of giving a profitable it department.
Re:One idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
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only problem is if you don't do the internal billing from IT you end up with the situation we had before that..
IT is a huge cost.. lets cut/slash/kill......
you end up with companies who think they can slash IT in half and it woln't change any other parts of the company..
if theses areas don't have some realization of the cost of what they are doing IT gets stuck with the cost - and an unjustifiable budget.. if marketing needs another 2k worth of storage they can justify it .. pay IT and we provide it.. el
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Same for us (mobile telco, 5m subscribers): 100 per 5 years
Re:One idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, if we'd work like this everyone will want to have a 100Gb homedirectory/outlook mailbox/subversion repo whatever. You say go to management and I'll tell you what they'll decide: the teams that make most of the money get it the rest wont. So cut out the middleman and make this common practise by rebilling I say. But then everything should be rebilled (and that's where it goes wrong most of the time: some team rebill and some don't. This effectively means mixing a capitalist and communist society and that don't work....)
This is exactly what happens. If IT resources are "all you can eat" then IT ends up rationing the supply. This works in smaller organizations where IT is heavily involved in the business. As the size of the organization gets larger, having IT deciding priorities between various groups is less desirable.
The inevitable result of unbilled IT is the CEO holding the line on the IT budget while the departments are demanding more and more services. Simple econ101 will tell you what happens next. If you fix supply and decouple demand, you get rationing.
There is an inevitable curve as companies get larger and larger:
1. IT handles everything
2. resources become constrained and an executive group attempts to prioritize IT projects
3. internal billing and budgeting is used to prioritize IT resources
4. Numbers used for internal billing are used to justify outsourcing and/or mini IT departments spring up inside divisions.
5. outsourcing/distributed IT produces mixed results and added complexity - so IT is insourced.
Depends on what you get for that (Score:2)
Cost Drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Hi,
I am willing to bet that the "gigabyte" usage is simply a cost driver. Accounting simply needs to know how to divide up IT costs and settled on this as a cost driver, possibly one of many, to determine what it takes to support each department.
This is neither new nor entirely bad. Sometimes it is better to go with an easy-to-implement, but only partially accurate number than one that is perfectly accurate but impossible to implement.
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Accounting simply needs to know how to divide up IT costs and settled on this as a cost driver, possibly one of many, to determine what it takes to support each department.
Bingo. When they "split out" IT as a department, chances are they just said "Well so far we have been spending this much a year and providing exactly x in storage GB, y in support hours, z in application runtimes, etc. etc. etc. The number then gets tweaked based on inflation, changing requirements (more speed, more backups, more whatever per unit) but what it probably isn't changing based on is *competition* which is the only thing that will make it go down.
If it's practical, pay an internet based file h
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The trouble is if your cost system is out of whack then people with limited budgets will make descisions that are good for them under the current system but would be bad descisions if things were more accurately accounted for.
In particular i'd think overcharging for storage would cause a lot of local badly backed up storage to pop up (at least that is what seems to happen at the uni I go to).
Think about it (Score:2)
$1/gig is barely a mirrored pair array stuck in a PC. Probably not even 15krpm SAS.
What exactly do you need?
Lots of storage?
Lots of I/O?
Redundancy?
Backups?
Disaster Recovery?
People to manage it?
It all costs money. If you don't need any of that then by all means, buy a PC, stick a couple of 1.5Tb drives in it, raid 0 them and call it the department server. Of course, other people in your organisation may have mandated all of the above.
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If you are talking about anything beyond a 2 man IT shop then all of these "non device" costs are going to be shared over a large number of customers. Backups, IO and redundancy isn't that expensive even for a small shop. The idea that it needs to be $30/G/Mo for a larger shop is absurd. If anything, this is just a reflection of how poorly companies themselves scale and how they tend to be crushed by their own weight and politics as they grow larger.
Nevermind a "sticking a disk in a PC". You could probably
Here is 67 Terabytes for $7867 (Score:2, Interesting)
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ [backblaze.com]
My answer:
67 terabytes is 67000 Gigabytes.
$7867 / 67000 = 11 cents per gigabyte.
Your mileage may vary.
Re:Here is 67 Terabytes for $7867 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here is 67 Terabytes for $7867 (Score:5, Insightful)
Also doesn't allocate anything for the cost of the person doing the maintenance/monitoring - that person doesn't come for free usually.
Re:Here is 67 Terabytes for $7867 (Score:4, Funny)
that person doesn't come for free usually.
Nah but they're real cheap in Malaysia.
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The import costs on those are through the roof, though. And then you have to pay for chains, and the guy with the whip, and purina IT chow. It adds up to where its almost cheaper to hire American these days.
This may merely be an allocation scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
What you may be seeing, especially if you are working for a very large company, could just be a cost allocation scheme, not a real money cost as you are thinking of it. If your department brings in revenue, the organization needs to match expenses to it for purposes of Management Accounting.
For instance, imagine you know it costs $X to run one of your cost centers. That dollar amount includes everything from the manpower, the equipment, the facility...everything. Now, they need to assign these costs to the departments that actually make money in a way that makes sense. They could do this by carefully costing out each service they provide and assigning an overhead rate, blah blah. That tends to be a pain. You do it if you have to...but you try not to have to. Another, easier, way of doing it is determining a usage metric (CPU hours, GB of storage, number of tickets) and using that to determine each profit center's percentage allocation of the overall cost.
So, the $60 per GB may not even be close to a market rate for storage. However, if all the departments used twice as much storage next year, the per GB cost might fall to $31 per GB (slightly more than half to account for the fact that there would obviously be more real costs). Conversely, if you convinced your management to contract externally for storage, everyone else might find their per GB cost rise, since the fixed costs would be static.
Re:This may merely be an allocation scheme (Score:4, Insightful)
Your description sounds about right. But, by using storage as your proxy for all IT cost you are putting perverse incentives for people to use less storage than is right for their business need (or to avoid using central storage, where it can be managed and backed up, and put their stuff on their own external HDDs).
I think a per person overhead charge, plus a storage charged at closer to cost is likely to work out better.
Conversely, if you convinced your management to contract externally for storage, everyone else might find their per GB cost rise, since the fixed costs would be static.
Right, so this is the exactly what a rational department manager should be doing.
Incidentally, I started looking into running my own departmental IMAP server yesterday to avoid much smaller charges of about $30/Gb/year for email archiving from central computing services.
Incentive (Score:2)
It is incentive to keep your data free of porn, lolcats, pictures of the 2007 Christmas party, CD rips, etc. It also helps to pay for the Ferraris that the IT department drives.
Hope This Helps [TM] (Score:2)
Don't think of it as $360/GB per year, think of it as $360,000/TB per year.
Factor "overall" cost of IT dept.. (Score:2)
It's possible the "internal" cost is simply some form of rudimentary metric to measure the relative usage that is made of the IT dept by each of the other depts (so each dept is charged accordingly).
--Ivan
Corporate charges (Score:2)
I have seen this directly. For example the corporate staff (including CEO) gets their wages divided into cost center charges.
Quick and dirty example: $3,000,000(corporate wages and expenses) / 500 cost centers = $6,000 per annum.
Alternatively if he wishes to keep digging, he will find himself pushed to the outer, or worse, managed out of his posit
It's not the bits... (Score:2)
Not enough info (Score:2)
Like many others are saying on here - you need to give us a lot more information here. There is a huge difference in the cost per gig between a Netgear and a NetApp. You also didn't mention if your cost analysis includes your OpEx costs (Operational Expenses) - things like hard costs (labor) and soft costs (power, hvac, floorspace, etc).
Tell us more and we'll be able to help you out better.
Depends on the level of storage (Score:2)
We charge people something like $30-40/GB one time cost for space on the NetApp 2020s. Reason is there's two redundant NetApps in two different buildings, one of which is also backed up to a tape library with tapes rotated out to a vault in yet another building. Also the NEtApps have space set aside to do hourly snapshots, in case you delete something. Costs just a little bit for that kind of performance and reliability. For our lesser storage system, which is basically just a supermicro case filled with 2T
Additional details (Score:2, Informative)
This is just storage space, not web pages/applications, or software etc. We're talking digital assets of the company such as documents, images, videos... etc. Basic, run of the mill file storage is being priced at $30 per gig, per month. It's basically just a giant network share. It doesn't need to be co-located just your typical raid array with some method of disaster recovery.
I'm interested in what other companies charge internally for file storage.
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See post from Sycraft-fu above for more details - he backs your $30/gig number.
From your detail "run of the mill file storage" and "digital assets of the company" aren't entirely the same thing. Depending on the number of workers involved and the reliance on the data, even an hour of downtime could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in my ~400 employee company it is well into that range). Therefore a simple network share is not appropriate. Even a raid 6 file server with a tape backup is not appro
My Cost (Score:3, Informative)
At the universisty where I work. IT charges $3.00 per GB/year to store data on a NetApp SAN. It then costs you another $3.00 GB/year for backups.
NOTE: In case you're wondering the two prices are charged separtely in case you have data that doesn't need to be backed up or have data that needs to be backed up but isn't stored on the SAN.
why this happens (Score:5, Informative)
The big reason for internal IT departments to charge other departments for services rendered is this:
When it comes time for a manager to "earn" his bonus, the first thing he looks at is cutting the budget for less profitable departments.
The IT department rarely has external clients for income, but is absolutely vital to keeping the business running.
Therefore to keep some short sighted pencil pusher from crippling the company with a failing infrastructure, the IT department has to show a "profit" for the services it renders.
Our Cost (Score:5, Informative)
Our data center provider offers storage on their FC SAN ( > 150mbps I/O) at a cost of $2.50/GB/month and an additional $2.50/GB for backups. This includes 24x7 support, 99.99% uptime, and is hosted in a tier 3+ data center. My guess is that smaller SANs cost more per GB, but you are getting boned at $30/GB.
On the other hand, if you are requiring some sort of high performance DAS with off site replication, then I bet the cost is considerably higher.
$12/gb per year (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CDW, Newegg, etc (Score:4, Insightful)
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Backup and redundancy can get awfully expensive, particularly if an online backup product like Evault is used. I don't know if its worth 30 dollars, but it's a pretty fucking good milkshake.
Re:CDW, Newegg, etc (Score:4, Insightful)
Backup and redundancy can get awfully expensive, particularly if an online backup product like Evault is used. I don't know if its worth 30 dollars, but it's a pretty fucking good milkshake.
Don't forget salary costs in IT to support it all.
That said, if IT is really using $30 per Gig then they aren't necessarily using the right online backups or tools. Redundancy doesn't cost that much. Geographical redundancy doesn't cost that much. Off-site "vaults" can be pricey, but not that expensive. If I were in the OPs shoes, I'd ask the IT department to share with me how they came up with that number. It's simple and not too confrontational. If their math is fuzzy or their numbers don't make sense, I'd follow up with them justifying that cost. It could just be that there is no IT budget, it all comes out of other budgets through this sort of thing. It could also be that someone has built a very good empire.
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No he wasn't He was talking about the cost he pays to his internal IT for storage. In most companies using a chargeback model for IT services, it does in fact include All of the costs the GP mentioned.
He did not indicate what storage included at his company, however it is not uncommon to include redundancy and backup in some offerings.. $30 for a gigabyte of replicated tier I storage with backup is still high.
Re:CDW, Newegg, etc (Score:5, Insightful)
Having done the modeling for this, here's some components to consider.
I have one example (AUD) where this works out as follows:
Do the maths above: excluding power, staff, tape libraries and rack space etc, it's already over $25 per usable GB for Tier 1 (and $13.57 in this model for the Tier 3 storage). Redundancy is baked in. Spare disks in the SAN are baked in (so a disk failure means immediate rebuild not "wait 4h until a replacement can be installed by an engineer" rebuild. And for this cost, we also have things like automatic deduplication of data (backup and online), data replication, historical backup to tape and so on and so forth.
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Right, so this means that the IT department in the summary could buy a new storage system every month, since they are charging $30/GB per month.
Actually, no it doesn't.
They have already paid over $25 dollars for every GB that they offer to the rest of the company.
Now, if you want to reduce these costs, you have to do a risk assessment. Under the model described in AUD above, there are at least 5 copies of a given set of data. Do you NEED the two DR copies ? Depending on the processing model, some intermediate files don't need to have any more than a single copy. In other words, storage space CAN cost $25 - $30 / GB, but thats for the rolls royce
IT Department Pricing to You, not TCO to Company (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a big difference between TCO to the company and whatever price the IT department charges *your* department for service. IT department prices are typically based on historical costs that don't necessarily represent the Moore's Law equivalent precipitous drop in disk space costs, and are often based on gold-brick engineering practices and specialized applications.
For instance, if you're running a high-end database or an Exchange server that's supporting the whole company, it needs to have a blazingly fast SAN array from EMC or somebody, and instead of using $50 1TB SATA drives, it's using $300 15000rpm 300-Gb SAS drives with SSD accelerators and uber-fancy controllers, built into a framework that lets them do maximum IOPS and live no-performance-hit backups. On the other hand, if you're trying to back up desktop data in case of laptop failures, or provide shared file storage where people can retrieve dull bureaucratic standards documents, performance isn't critical, price and volume are, so you want a big slow cheap Network Attached Storage device packed full of TB SATA drives, with a bit of RAID to deal with the occasional drive failure, and still some kind of backup system or maybe a tape-loading robot (if tapes are still even cost-effective.)
And it's not uncommon for IT departments to charge you for the former, even if you'd rather have the latter.
I'm dealing with a variant on this problem right now, for a network management application. The servers and storage in the data center are designed for blazing speed, but the application I'm trying to support is customers who want to archive all their network event data for a couple of years to make Sarbanes and Oxley and their friends happy, so I need fast servers for today's data, maybe something medium-speed for a week's data (but SATA's probably enough), and 98% of my data will never be looked at again but the rules want it online, not in a box of tapes.
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Fixed that for you.
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TCO is very dependent on what you're doing.
If I recall correctly, one of the large sites I worked for had about 10Gb to 15Gb online at any given time for one site. It was served off of cheap servers with IDE drives. But, since there were millions of daily visitors (somewhere between 4 million on a slow day, to over 8 millon on normal high days, and peaks well above that), the bandwidth costs were huge in comparison to anything else.
Some places, the content itse
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Great!
Except your terms of service don't appear to mention anything along the lines of availability, backups, etc..
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Let alone a SAS70.
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OK, I'll bite.
You buy 1 TB HD : one time Cost=$100
you want to not worry if it fails so
You buy another 1 TB HD: one time Cost=$100+$100
You want an off-line backup so
You buy Tapes+tape drives:
one time Cost=$100+$100+$1500
monthly cost=$100
You want someone else to manage it...
Yup, your 1TB of storage is starting to cost alot.
Not wrong question (Score:2)
He wants to know what prices other people's IT departments charge their users, because he thinks he's way out of line even for that. Costs are a whole nother game entirely - lots of people aren't clear about what their costs are...