Unlock Data Storage with a Better TCO Strategy
3/1/2023
Building a hyperscale cloud data center generally costs between US$ 7 million and 12 million dollars. Accordingly, minimizing the total cost of building storage servers is critical, as a 1% reduction in cost can equal a US$ 70-120 thousand difference. Determining the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a particular solution can present difficulties. Fortunately, there are some strategies for simplifying the calculation.
One way to think of TCO is to compare two different storage configurations and analyze the difference. For example, when building a data center it may be possible to achieve the same capacity goal using a single 12TB storage solution or two 6TB HDD solutions. Adopting this single solution method also uses less drive rack space.
This helps reduce operating expenses accrued from building lease and/or construction costs. It further reduces heating/cooling expenses and eliminates HDD maintenance expenses. Likewise, it reduces capital expenditure considerably by removing non-hard drive equipment and eliminating the cost of racks and enclosures.
Achieving the lowest dollar to TB cost is almost always achieved by utilizing the highest capacity hard drive available. Despite this, there are benefits to using multiple smaller HDD solutions. The main advantage concerns performance. Two fully-connected storage systems can produce double the read and write performance via the use of smaller capacity HDD solutions. This extra performance comes at an extra cost. As such, the architect’s main task is balancing cost and performance.
Success in reducing TCO can be achieved through adopting strategies that cost-effectively mitigate performance issues using high-capacity hard drives. Likewise, reduction can be achieved by applying a portion of drives to increase performance within a reduced data center footprint. Using SSDs or combination of HDDs with SSD to eliminate critical bottlenecks and creating caching layers is a further measure.
Evaluating the current storage infrastructure in these key areas can help identify areas for improvement and develop a better TCO strategy for data storage needs.
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