Hi — this post completes my blog series outlining the design concepts behind an enterprise-class storage service suitable for hosting not just secondary but even primary enterprise data.
Here is an outline of this series and hyperlinks to previous posts:
- Introduction
- Accessed like traditional storage
- Easy to use enterprise features
- Comprehensive data integrity/protection
- Data security/privacy
- Continuous availability
- Non-blocking performance
- Administrative transparency and control
- Provides good investment value
This last post is more business-focused and less product-focused, and concerns the need for such a service to provide good investment value to customers.
Throughout this series, I have attempted to touch on the various technical concepts and requirements that need to be fulfilled before an IT person will trust his data to a storage service; but if the service isn’t priced to make good business sense, it won’t work for our customers no matter how well it is designed.
When considering “good value” in this context, it is imperative to think holistically about what a storage service provider is providing to its customers, since it is far more than just storage capacity. Using an enterprise storage service should free an IT professional from having to do all of the following:
- Acquire storage capacity
- Configure file system software
- Design, provision and configure the specific solution (all done instantly)
- Obtain data center resources (space, power, cooling, etc)
- Provision networking infrastructure and bandwidth
- Protect the data (i.e. backup)
- Secure the data (i.e. encryption)
- Administer and manage the solution 24×7
- Support storage users, 24×7
The customers we have who have done serious analysis on their storage costs on a per-gigabyte, per-month basis have told us that their costs range from $1.00 to over $3.00 per month per gigabyte. This may not seem intuitive in a world where capital outlay for capacity can be as low as $1.00/GB, but when all the other costs are factored in, storage gets much more expensive to do yourself. Try some comparisons using the Zetta TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator.
| Traditional Storage Ownership Costs | |
| Tier 1 | $3.50/GB per month |
| Tier 2 | $1.25/GB per month |
| Tier 3 | $1.00/GB per month |
And there can be many other, less-immediately-obvious (but no less tangible) values to using an enterprise storage service provider, including:
- Administrator opportunity cost savings — time is now freed up to work on things that really impact the business, not managing disk rebuilds
- Future proofing — the need to upgrade your infrastructure every 3-5 years has now been offloaded to the service provider — no more data migrations!
- Maintenance costs — no more maintenance contracts to your hardware and software vendors
- No re-coding/re-architecting to use the service — if a service has been built for an enterprise, with standard access protocol support, then you can onload your data — and offload your data — without any changes to your existing infrastructure.
Reflecting back over the entire list of enterprise requirements, when Zetta started this adventure at the end of 2007, it was with the goal of providing enterprise IT professionals with a storage service designed for their primary storage needs. The service we have in market today meets the requirements that IT people told us they would need in such a service. I invite you to explore further and see the benefits that other enterprise IT professionals are already enjoying at www.zetta.net.
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