The Storage Economist

One of the expenses included in storage and IT economics is the cost of procurement. I discovered and documented this cost element about a year ago while working in Australia.

Storage Economics at HDS is approaching its 13th year, and along with the thousands of engagements done around the world, we have prepared many people to think like an economist, talk like an accountant, and act like an architect. Hundreds of HDS employees, partners and even some customers have taken the path of IT economics enlightenment. [...]

Actually the title of this blog should be “Cost Savings Sharing,” but that is not a very catchy way to draw you in.

Most of us have a car, or once had a car, and know that an oft-overlooked function is maintenance every 5,000 miles (8,000 km) as the manufacturer recommends. Due to this omission, an automobile will deteriorate – according to the 2nd  law of thermodynamics (or law of entropy) and the deterioration in thermodynamic systems. This [...]

The other day I ordered this poster to hang in my office from one of those de-motivator sites…

This post is the second of a three-part series of excerpts from an upcoming paper on Hypervisor Economics (you can find part one here). As always, I look forward to reading your comments and feedback below.

For years I have encouraged clients to ask for TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) data when they create requests for purchases (RFP, RFI, ITT, etc). Customers need to ask vendors for more than just the price, they need to ask for the total cost. Lately, I have seen more of these requests come in from [...]

Cloud offering are the hot topic of the day. There are various options for cloud services these days. Capacity on Demand, Managed Service Utility, SaaS etc. When we talk about clouds being a solution to reduce costs, we make these recommendations after we know what kind of costs the client is interested in reducing.

I was forwarded a link to an article today that reported on the cost of an unscheduled outage. The report states that downtime (across various industries) was approximately $5,600 per minute. I have collected a series of time and outage risks costs over the years (see table below), and this rate of $5K/min may seem [...]

My previous entry introduced some of the cost and architecture parameters that I have been investigating relative to cloud storage architectures. I have shown that looking at cost of acquisition only, it is easy to see that DAS is the winner. Both TCO and TCDO measurements counts only the CAPEX costs associated with storage ownership. [...]