HDS: The storage economics of cloud technology

In a recession, companies in all industries face budget pressures, especially when it comes to investing. The problem is compounded by the numerous business opportunities and potential problems associated with the new storage architecture. Therefore, for many enterprises, find the principle of IT system optimization and cost control, is the key to maintain the benign operation of the business and use the original resources to create more value. Even if the economic situation is not good, the company's four key strategic principles of IT systems will always remain unchanged, these principles for the enterprise's IT system optimization and cost control to provide the yardstick. Whether it is a major economic crisis or a technological leap, these four principles apply, enabling companies to identify and measure costs, reduce capital expenditures, control operating costs, and achieve sustained growth.

Virtualization is the hallmark of a new era of IT outsourcing services, and the newer storage architectures are shifting to the network at an ever-increasing speed. The growing number of cloud computing, virtual machines, Machine architectures, and other architectures require us to re-examine existing storage facilities, prices, costs, and operational approaches. Cloud storage is one of the most competitive major solutions because it helps reduce costs and enables enterprises to get out of other business and focus on their core competencies and priorities. However, the enterprise must still consider and plan the cost of its entire IT architecture, including virtualization and cloud-based component costs, to truly increase efficiency and achieve a tangible return on investment (ROI). Treat IT services or cloud services as utilities like hydroelectric power, it is important to take into account the fact that, unlike gas or power lines, an enterprise's IT infrastructure is not a fixed cost for fixed provisioning; IT infrastructure is dynamic and constantly reflects the business processes and information flow of the enterprise.

Four principles of storage economics

While cloud computing and virtualization can be a huge business benefit, IT managers must be aware of what can be virtualized and what cannot be virtualized. The head of the business must abandon the old mindset and not just the capital expenditure to determine the cost, or it may be wrong to estimate what profit the cloud strategy can achieve. Business owners also need to be aware that if they are already using third-party services or infrastructure outsourcing, then the savings are in the end of their own costs or the cost of the suppliers? IT management should first determine the cost of an existing storage architecture, measure costs, determine which factors affect these costs, and ultimately identify who will benefit from the cost savings. If it is only to transfer costs rather than actually reduce costs, there is obviously no substantial benefit, which is one of the reasons why business executives must analyze all the cost savings and other benefits that can be generated before considering the adoption of cloud services. In pushing these changes, you must think like an economist, argue like an accountant, and act like a technical expert.

The following four principles provide a fixed framework that can help you develop scientific strategic and tactical investment decisions to gain business benefits and successfully control the cost of storage facilities in your organization in the long run. The application of these four principles to any new architecture will help distinguish between price hype and long-term operating costs associated with each new schema.

1 cost of ownership includes not only price

Please keep in mind that price is not equal to cost. In the past few years, the proportion of IT infrastructure capital expenditure in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the data storage system has shown a gradual downward trend, from the past 50-60% to around 20%, the other 80% of the cost is mainly operating expenditure (OPEX), including labor, Maintenance and power expenditure. In fact, the unit cost of disk space can be considered close to 0, but the cyclical cost of the system is becoming the largest and most critical it TCO project, which is the cost that managers need to determine and control.

2) 34 Kinds of costs

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." Based on this principle, managers must first identify and quantify the actual costs that constitute the total cost of ownership. Overall, there are 34 types of cost components that comprise the total cost of ownership of storage (see appendix for details), some are hardware or direct costs, some are software costs or overheads, some are capital expenditures, and some are operating expenses.

Not all policies apply to each business level of the enterprise, and cloud policies can only reduce some costs and possibly additional costs. For example, cloud policy implementation imperfections may not affect storage management labor costs, but may increase litigation risk costs or increase security and encryption costs. The cost of hardware depreciation, maintenance and warranty, storage management, energy consumption, monitoring and data center footprint can be directly reduced through cloud solutions in the following 34 costs. The cost of purchasing software/depreciation and software maintenance may also be reduced accordingly. However, it is important to note that all other costs may increase if the cloud policy is not implemented correctly.

Similarly, some of the most important cost-saving opportunities and advantages are likely to be missed because of old-fashioned thinking and ideas. The cost of enterprise development lies in the real benefits of a good cloud strategy, enabling businesses to rapidly expand their IT systems and sizes in a fraction of the cost of traditional spending. If companies are overly wedded to planning on the basis of existing needs and infrastructure, future gains may not be available.

It planners must look at all 34 costs in a holistic way, deciding which costs are most critical to current and future business processes, using the appropriate cloud resources and internal resources. The overall cost is categorized according to the cost of the internal storage after the cloud transformation and the cost of transferring to the cloud service provider.

3. Valuable storage Architecture creates value

The most valuable storage architecture is the one that is most helpful to cost savings, not the lowest-cost architecture. If cloud-based systems are not implemented correctly, removing costs from internal or capital expenditure balance sheets will only shift those costs to other areas. Since high operating costs will soon show up in the short term, the cost of storage TCO must be calculated from a long-term perspective. This architecture may not be the cheapest to buy, but it should be a less expensive architecture, while it planners must carefully consider how the cloud component will actually affect TCO. The main contents include:

-Data volumes, file systems, virtualization of storage systems-dynamic tiered storage-mixed storage-automatic compact pre-configured-off the solenoid disk, maid technology-multi-protocol SAN storage-Data de-duplication, data compression-integrated archiving-management, based on the overall planning of the configuration

Storage virtualization, as well as tiered storage and dynamic preconfigured (or streamlined configurations), have proven multiple times to reduce the total cost of ownership by 20%-35% over the previous internal or island-level storage architectures. Of the 34 costs, the most significant costs are waste, migration, replication, and labor costs.

4 econometrics will guide you to the road

Econometrics refers to the economic measurement system that quantifies costs and tracks the progress of cost reduction, must be implemented in conjunction with a good storage architecture to develop storage or investment plans for measurable cost areas, and use that information to plan, prioritize, and develop blueprints based on various expected activities to reduce costs and support business requirements. Cloud based systems, in particular, require econometrics to track costs, which are now often external costs, and are difficult to determine with traditional internal accounting methods.

Clearly, there is a double risk of loss of data and money in the cloud. As technology changes, companies need to push it to long-term computing TCO, and if short-sighted focus on cutting capital spending only increases the risk. At the same time, given that the IT department is often in a dilemma between technological progress and cost pressures, managers must decide on the basis of a good deal and balance between these two needs. The four principles of storage economics have at least laid a solid foundation for the storage architecture to truly utilize cloud technology.

34 Kinds of Cost:

1. Hardware Depreciation and Leasing 2. Software purchase or depreciation 3. Hardware repair or warranty 4. Software repair or warranty 5. Storage management, for example: Configuration, adjustment, load balancing, overhaul and upgrade of labor costs 6. Backup and disaster recovery, for example: Backup and restore, disaster preparedness planning and testing of labor costs 7. Data migration, reconfiguration of labor costs 8. Data movement-moving data to different levels of time and effort, or archiving solution 9 in the data lifecycle. Power consumption and cooling cost 10. Monitoring-SNMP, NOC, and Operation console 11 for storage, SAN, and backup architectures. The data center occupies space 12. Configuration Time-An enterprise's impact on the amount of time required for a host to demand 13. Waste costs (two types: Available unassigned, not allocated)

14. Replication costs-database management systems (DBMS) and other applications often need to make multiple copies of 15. Copy data cost-multiple copies of the same data cost 16. Growth costs-growth costs for each storage architecture. The wrong architecture is in a high-growth environment, and the cost of growth can be as high as 17. Cost of regular downtime (microcode changes, capacity upgrades)

18. The cost of unscheduled downtime (depending on the machine)

19. Cost of unscheduled downtime (depending on people and processes)

20. Disaster risk, cost of business recovery 21. Recovery-time objectives and recovery-point objectives (RTO and RPO) costs-system failure or backup recovery to recovery time (or point) costs 22 of business impact from time spent. Data loss 23. Litigation, discovery of risk-legal risks associated with litigation and the time cost of electronic discovery (E-discovery) 24. Reduction of hazardous waste-mainly the costs incurred by EU regulations, such as RoHS regulations. Hardware that does not meet the requirements generates additional tariffs due to asset disposal.

25. Performance cost-impact on the business (good or bad)

26. Backup infrastructure-including backup servers, media servers, tape libraries, drives, and more.

27. Backup media-local and remote media backup costs, recurring and capacity-related costs 28. Risk costs for backup windows – Business reduction or Limited backup window Impact 29. CIFS, NFS-related infrastructure-file managers, gateways and necessary software for businesses to provide file servers and shared services 30. Local and remote Data circuits – dark fiber for San extensions, remote replication and related software 31. Storage Area Network-a dedicated Fibre channel, iSCSI, or NAS connectivity infrastructure. This includes routers, gateways, host bus adapter switches, and guide 32. The risk of non-compliance (archiving, data retention) –  some legal and regulatory requirements (such as HIPAA, Basel II, Sarbanes-Oxley, carbon emissions), which result in 33 of fines, negative publicity and criminal prosecutions. Protects data and storage infrastructure security and encryption costs by 34. Procurement-costs associated with the time and effort required to procure hardware and software, including preparation, review, negotiation, selection and certification.