The Storage Economist

There has been great news about nondisruptive migration capabilities, and Hu has a great post that you can read here on the options now available from HDS. Hu quoted me on a rate of $15K per TB for traditional migration, and I would like to address this rate and the research we have done on costs associated with various migration options.

First, I would refer you to our foundation paper, written 2 years ago, on the costs of array migration. Certainly many cost factors have changed in 2 years, but the core principles are still the same.

In my original research on migration costs 6 years ago, I found the rate of migration averaging between $7-10K per TB. Our joint paper with TechValidate raised this cost to $15K, but for conservative situations, I tend to start the dialog around $7K. These costs are broken into the following categories:

1. Change control and remediation
2. Server and SAN outage cost
3. Application outage
4. Labor for data migration (internal and external staff)
5. Tools for migration – specialized HW and SW
6. The added environmental costs (double the floor space and cooling for migration time period)
7. Reduction of the useful life (on-boarding and off-boarding shrinks this time)
8. Maintenance costs

Before this new nondisruptive migration announcement, 40-80% reductions in migration costs were typical, primarily relying on virtualization benefits to reduce time, effort and labor associated with the migrations. With nondisruptive migration service, we can truly impact the outage costs to the SAN, servers and applications. Based on data from the TechValidate surveys, the outage costs and risk constitute 30-50% of the migration cost. We can expect another step-drop in migration costs when the impact to outage is minimalized.

Again, I refer you to the paper—although I have to admit, it may be time to revisit and revise in light of new capabilities and cost reduction options now available.