Cost of Migration – The TCO Surprise
by David Merrill on October 21, 2009
In storage economics analysis that we do around the globe, a recurring and problematic cost is the cost of migration. This is often a ‘surprise’ cost since it happens down the road and it not realized entirely by storage architects. This tends to be an operations cost, and as I wrote several years ago, a cost that is not insignificant, and at a time when the array is fully depreciated (or at the end of the lease). Over the years, some anecdotal observations:
- Cost of migrations can vary depending on they money you want to include, but we tend to estimate at $7-10K per TB
- HDS is completing a comprehensive survey on migration cost, and this 7-10K estimate that I have been using for the last 4 years is likely a gross underestimation of the real costs
- All things considered with migration, ROHS and tech refresh time and effort, the cost to de-commission large arrays can approach ½ the original purchase cost
- If you have more than 200TB, you are probably in a constant state of migration. In other words, above 200TB you have full time effort, staff or contractors working on storage migration tasks
- The time to complete migrations tends to run between 4-6 months. I had lunch with an investment client yesterday, and she told me that they plan on 6 months but that often and realistically tends to be 8-9 months
- With 4, 6 or 9 months to get off a platform and on to the next, the effective life of the asset is diminished by 10-30% (Depending on how long you lease or depreciate assets)
- Vendors often mask the cost of migration by offering ‘free’ migration services if you buy their replacement story. But there are real costs to your organization even if the heavy lifting is done by the vendor
So let’s break down all the costs associated with array and data migrations. I am co-authoring a more detailed paper on these costs, as well as how these costs compare to different migration methods available today. But for now, understanding the types of costs will help as you try to reconcile the real cost of storage/data migration:
- Application change control
- Server Change control
- SAN Change control
- Server Outage Cost
- Application Outage Cost
- Data Movement Internal Labor
- Data Movement External Labor
- Tape Resources
- Specialized software for migration
- Specialized hardware for migration
- Added environmental costs
- Duplicate Software license costs during the migration
- Extended period Maintenance costs
- Additional Network costs for switches and HBAs
More on these costs later (and in the paper), but the next blog will outline the methods and comparative options for migration. If there is a cheaper way to migrate from one array to the next (and is vendor independent), are you interested?
Comments (4 )
Tweets that mention David Merrill’s Blog » Blog Archive » Cost of Migration – The TCO Surprise -- Topsy.com on 21 Oct 2009 at 2:08 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Steve Beards, Hitachi Data Systems. Hitachi Data Systems said: Have you read the new post on The Storage Economist blog? "Cost of Migration – The TCO Surprise" http://bit.ly/2mKR9h [...]
MarkW on 28 Oct 2009 at 7:35 am
“If there is a cheaper way to migrate from one array to the next (and is vendor independent), are you interested?”
Yes! And anyone else who runs into this should be as well….
We have a bit over 1.2PB of storage currently deployed, and an average growth per year of 35%-40% (and it seems we frequently exceed this “average”), we are in a semi-constant state of migration from EoL/EoSL equipment.
To add to that we are currently transitioning from an internal IT based service to a Storage as a Service model providing multiple sister-companies with various IT services including but not limited to storage hosting, and understanding the short and long term costs around storage beyond the “standard” TCO model has become critical to our technical and financial planning.
- Mark W.
david merrill on 05 Nov 2009 at 6:34 am
Sorry to leave an open-ended question unresolved. I have been in Asia for 2 weeks since this post was written, I will get the follow-up post done this week. The quick answer is this - virtualization can make significant impact on the time and effort requried for array based migration. About a 80-90% improvement over traditional methods.
Hu Yoshida » Blog Archive » If I am doing more with less people and disk are getting cheaper, why are my costs increasing? on 31 Jan 2010 at 10:32 pm
[...] Five year ago there might have been 10 or 12 storage frames that made up the 50 TB, and storage was direct attached. Doing a device migration for direct attached storage with a handful of application servers could be done in few weekends. Today 500 TB could be on two storage frames connected to hundreds of servers through a SAN, and a device migration could take six months or more while migrating 4 or 5 applications a weekend to minimize application down time. For this reason David Merrill, the storage economist, estimates that the burdened cost to do a device migration toda… [...]
