TCO Reduction: A Customer Perspective
by David Merrill on Oct 5, 2011
I have the opportunity to speak at the Gartner ITxpo in Orlando two weeks from today, on Wednesday, October 19th. If you are attending, would love to see you at the session and exchange cards afterwards. My topic will focus on the impact to TCO that can be achieved from storage virtualization. You can find several related white papers and blogs on this topic that I have worked on over the years.
The highlight of participating in this session will be that I get to share the stage with Paulette Scheffer, Sr. Director of IT Infrastructure and Service Management at Adobe. She will review their multi-year journey of storage cost reduction, and the role that storage virtualization played in their achievement. In a four year period that produced 64% year-on-year storage capacity growth, Adobe was able to reduce unit cost (TCO-per-GB/year) from $11.00 to just under $5.00. Now this unit cost is much more than the purchase price, and incorporated some 15 types of cost that include depreciation, maintenance, labor, DR infrastructure, circuits, SAN, management, migration, cost of waste, NAS infrastructure and file servers, management tool, power, cooling and floorspace. They also measured the cost of DR and outage risk; costs that not too many companies measure or track these days.
I do not want to step on all of her talking points, but this is a compelling graphic on the unit cost achievements over the years at Adobe (note that TCO measurements were not done in 2010).
You will also notice two measurements in 2011 for unit cost. The first is 2011P and is the unit cost per physical TB. The second is 2011V and is the virtual TB unit cost. Adobe is quickly moving to deploying and presenting virtual capacity for most applications.
Since not all of my readers can attend this conference, I will dedicate two or three blog entries later in October and November to summarize my presentation on virtualization economics, as well as Paulette’s presentation on what cost reduction benefits have been achieved at Adobe.
In the meantime, for a complete run down of our presence at Gartner ITxpo and how to engage with us, please scan this QR code with your smartphone.
