Building a TCO model for storage

It looks like I’m not alone in wondering whether or not cloud storage offers any financial advantages over storing your files in your own systems. Martin Glassborow has links to two people that are trying to build a TCO model for storage that can be used to compare local to “cloud-sourced” storage.

Nick Pearce has posted an extensive list of factors to take into account, an has promised to post a spreadsheet that can be used to analyze these. Ian builds on this and adds this great summary of the problem:

So in my job I regularly see what each vendor claims to be a ‘TCO model’ – now funnily enough these normally show that the vendor’s widget is much better than the competitor’s other widget

So let’s join forces and try to crowdsource a decent model that can be used to compare different products easily, without relying on vendor-sponsored TCO studies. I doubt there will ever be a single model that can encompass everything, but having a standard model to build on will help many IT managers.

Another important thing that’s missing are publicly available benchmarks; for single drives, benchmarks are rather easy to find, but for larger storage systems things get more complicated. Vendor-supplied benchmarks are often unrepresentative of real-life performance; a shared database of benchmarks and customer experiences for larger storage systems would provide some extra background when deciding what products to evaluate in-depth for a specific project.

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