My previous entry introduced some of the cost and architecture parameters that I have been investigating relative to cloud storage architectures. I have shown that looking at cost of acquisition only, it is easy to see that DAS is the winner. Both TCO and TCDO measurements counts only the CAPEX costs associated with storage ownership. But price is only a fraction of costs. Over the life of storage, the OPEX costs can reach 3-5X the purchase price, so in the second part of my Cloud Storage Economic series, it is worthwhile to look at TCO for Cloud Storage Architectures and determine if there is a cross-over point between DAS and Enterprise arrays.
First, let’s take a look at how I break down the types of money between these four cost modeling methods:
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In the previous blog post, we saw that there was not a cross-over point or cost parity between DAS and Enterprise when we look only at total raw capacity. There was a cross over point for TCDO at 900 units, when we look at the costs to storage data (not just present capacity). When we add Hard and Soft costs to the TCDO view, we see that enterprise architectures can become economically better at a certain point of scale, total size, data types, data value, transaction workload, and processing value.
If we first look at the TCO plus (traditionally) hard costs of CAPEX, we can see a cross-over point at around 500 units.
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Next, when we consider adding soft costs to the mix, the cross-over point is around 100 units.
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Don’t forget that both the X and Y axis are logarithmic. The differences in real dollars is much more significant than what is presented in the graph.
In the next entry, I will present some conclusions and observations from our work in Cloud Architecture Economics. Understanding all the costs, and the inflection points at capacity, is important in taking a long-term view of these architectures and their total costs.
