32…. and counting
by David Merrill on Jul 25, 2006
No, I am not talking about my age.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the 30 types of ‘things’ that make up the total cost of storage ownership. Anil Gupta commented on my blog and made some good points, in addition to providing a good graphic on how to characterize these costs. The point was made, that I have not thought of everything. I seem to hear that from my kids from time to time.
There are more than 30. About 2 years ago there were 26. The list continues to grow and evolve as the storage infrastructure space evolves. I have added some of my new cost categories for your review, so that we are up to about 32:
31: The cost of data and storage security
32: Remastering costs of storage upgrades (asset write-down, data migration, start-up, etc.)
I have a PPT that describes these 30 (needs to be updated to 32 now) cost elements, and how they tend to behave relative to being hard costs, soft costs, OPEX costs or CAPEX costs. There is also a time-dependent nature to the types of cost (short-term, long term). See the summary chart:
Bottom line, I need your ideas and inputs on the types of costs that need to be considered in developing cost of ownership models. Price does not equal cost. We need to keep track of what costs are buried in the storage infrastructure.
Comments (1)
Scott McCready on 27 Jul 2006 at 10:12 am
I think that you are taking a very pragmatic approach to storage in rightly demanding that the cost categories be complete. CIOview has created three storage TCO tools that are “state of the art” and used by thousands of storage professionals. Happy to provide you with a complimentary copy for your review.
