As IT departments and storage planners continue to look at best practices and technologies to proactively reduce ownership costs, a tiered storage approach should be investigated and presented as a viable option for future storage strategies. While many IT planners assume that purchasing low-cost disk solutions will drive down the total cost of storage ownership, Hitachi Data Systems has observed that price alone does not equate to lowering operating expenses or reducing the total cost of disk ownership. Properly designing and implementing multitiered storage concepts can significantly and positively alter current and long-term costs.
This paper examines trends observed by Hitachi Data Systems consultants and IT analysts, which indicate that purchasing only cheaper disk solutions to reduce shortterm capital expense can produce a negative long-term impact on operating expense. It then considers multitiered storage, a method of incorporating cheaper disk technology into a comprehensive tiered storage architecture, which can effectively reduce both capital and operating expense, while providing the levels of service necessary in today’s complex and evolving storage infrastructures.
The potential to lower storage-related operating costs (OPEX) over three years with tiered storage has been measured at around 15 percent, when compared to a singletiered architecture. This paper characterizes cost-savings areas, calculation methods, and proofs related to reducing labor, capital expense (CAPEX), waste, and infrastructure with a tiered storage architecture.
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