Internal Costs Per Gigabyte — What Do You Pay? 420
CodePwned writes "I recently took over a position at a rather large company where I discovered my group was paying $30 per gigabyte per month! That's $360 per year per gigabyte to our own IT department. While I understand costs are different depending on the scale, redundancy, backup and support methods, there doesn't seem to be any good papers on what range you should expect your costs to be. So far, my research shows an average of $1 per gigabyte or less for internally hosted space. What do you pay?"
$3/Gb/Month (Score:2, Informative)
$3/Gb/Month
Costs for what? (Score:5, Informative)
For backed up to tape storage? Storage replicated to another, remote datacenter? Snapshotted at regular intervals?
SAN storage? NAS? Direct attach? On arrays with 10 drives, 100 drives, or 1000 drives?
Fast SAS or FC drives? SATA arrays? 5400 RPM? 7200? 10k? 15k?
If you're paying $360/GB/yr for low end storage that sucks. For very high end, with replication and snapshots and the fastest drives and so forth, that's pretty high, but not an order of magnitude high.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
"Internal" in the question refers (very obtusely) to the cost within a company. In other words, $X per gigabyte is taken from his department's budget in order to "pay" for their IT use.
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Cost Drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Hi,
I am willing to bet that the "gigabyte" usage is simply a cost driver. Accounting simply needs to know how to divide up IT costs and settled on this as a cost driver, possibly one of many, to determine what it takes to support each department.
This is neither new nor entirely bad. Sometimes it is better to go with an easy-to-implement, but only partially accurate number than one that is perfectly accurate but impossible to implement.
For storage, right? (Score:1, Informative)
Higher ed, 4gb FC EMC SAN, weekly tape backups:
First 2GB is free, after that it's $7/GB/yr
Re:$40 (Score:3, Informative)
No monthly cost to our group. Once its bought, the ongoing operations cost comes out of someone else's budget.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
He's at a large company, where one department (IT) actually charges other departments (sales, development) for services. He wants to know what he should expect to be charged by IT per GB of storage. He thinks the IT department at his company is overpricing to provide for Aeron chairs.
Additional details (Score:2, Informative)
This is just storage space, not web pages/applications, or software etc. We're talking digital assets of the company such as documents, images, videos... etc. Basic, run of the mill file storage is being priced at $30 per gig, per month. It's basically just a giant network share. It doesn't need to be co-located just your typical raid array with some method of disaster recovery.
I'm interested in what other companies charge internally for file storage.
My Cost (Score:3, Informative)
At the universisty where I work. IT charges $3.00 per GB/year to store data on a NetApp SAN. It then costs you another $3.00 GB/year for backups.
NOTE: In case you're wondering the two prices are charged separtely in case you have data that doesn't need to be backed up or have data that needs to be backed up but isn't stored on the SAN.
why this happens (Score:5, Informative)
The big reason for internal IT departments to charge other departments for services rendered is this:
When it comes time for a manager to "earn" his bonus, the first thing he looks at is cutting the budget for less profitable departments.
The IT department rarely has external clients for income, but is absolutely vital to keeping the business running.
Therefore to keep some short sighted pencil pusher from crippling the company with a failing infrastructure, the IT department has to show a "profit" for the services it renders.
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Performance, reliability, and price, pick two. (Score:2, Informative)
Well, you can start with probably $400k to pay salary and benefits to the guy who maintains it for 3 years, plus equipments costs, plus backup solution, network, physical premisis, insurance, power, HVAC, UPS. Plus you want high availability, then double pretty much everything.
Our Cost (Score:5, Informative)
Our data center provider offers storage on their FC SAN ( > 150mbps I/O) at a cost of $2.50/GB/month and an additional $2.50/GB for backups. This includes 24x7 support, 99.99% uptime, and is hosted in a tier 3+ data center. My guess is that smaller SANs cost more per GB, but you are getting boned at $30/GB.
On the other hand, if you are requiring some sort of high performance DAS with off site replication, then I bet the cost is considerably higher.
Re:Eh? (Score:3, Informative)
I think it's hardly vague given his post contained terms like redundancy, backup and internally hosted space. Not sure but I think "internally hosted space" was the givaway...
$12/gb per year (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Eh? (Score:3, Informative)
He's paying the loan IT took out to integrate a system to provide 1TB in 2005 across who knows how many platforms probably including wonderful legacy applications from 1982 written in COBOL.
Yeah, but both programs and data from almost 30 years ago would have exceptionally small- if not negligible- storage requirements by modern standards, so those likely aren't adding much to the total.
Re:CDW, Newegg, etc (Score:3, Informative)
Right, so this means that the IT department in the summary could buy a new storage system every month, since they are charging $30/GB per month.
Actually, no it doesn't.
They have already paid over $25 dollars for every GB that they offer to the rest of the company.
Now, if you want to reduce these costs, you have to do a risk assessment. Under the model described in AUD above, there are at least 5 copies of a given set of data. Do you NEED the two DR copies ? Depending on the processing model, some intermediate files don't need to have any more than a single copy. In other words, storage space CAN cost $25 - $30 / GB, but thats for the rolls royce version.
Just make sure that if you ask for the Trabant version [wikimedia.org], that's really all you need.
Re:$40 (Score:2, Informative)
40$ per Gigabyte is not that bad if you don't have to pay to acquire 15K RPM SAN drives which can easily run into 2500$ for a 600 GB drive with dual path fibre channel. Fibre channel HBA will run into the 1000$ a piece (twice for redundancy) plus all the SAN switches needed to connect your SAN to your server, again very expensive costs to front for an IT dept. Oh and you get to pay also for nice 24/7 maintenance contracts plus all that support staff with their big salaries because no janitor can build a SAN infrastructure after all, and if he can he will charge you big bucks anyway.
You can't expect 24/7 99.99% reliability out of consumer hardware, and as for the commenter that said that for 300 000$ he'd buy 100 servers that he would host at 100 different sites and replicate all that data, hum well good luck with that and that thing won't get implemented before a year of running around the country and bandwidth costs will probably double the operating budget.
Good and efficient IT operations are like race car teams, they cost a lot, can do trivial operations in seconds and can plan for the worst and still come out ahead. Other cheap solutions ? Go the Google way and let the advertisement pay for it all, other than that put everything on your cheap 1TB pc hard drive and hope it never fails or gets flooded, or stolen, after all how long does it take a human to fill 1TB of actual work data on average ? Multiply that by the hourly costs of such employees and soon you'll discover that HR costs are much higher than typical IT costs.
$30 May not be bad (Score:1, Informative)
I pay nearly $55/GB/Month for a couple applications, so $30 isn't that bad. Complaining about it based on the fact that a hard drive is $0.05/GB is an idiotic argument at best.
And I do have a chargeback breakdown that covers the entire amount, and it's well justified for a regulated enviroment that's replicated to multiple sites with dual backup and guaranted 5ms average I/O response time.
The original question should be is the value of the application and associated data worth $30/GB/month to the business? If it's a bunch of PST's and MP3's, then obviously not. If it's an order entry system, CRM, DSS, SCM, etc...then it quite possibly may very well be worth that much.
$8/GB/year (Score:2, Informative)
In a government agency we're charged internally $8/GB/yr for online storage. We have a hot replica ready to come online if the primary goes down for any reason, it's incrementally backed up to tape (using Tivoli) each night and the encrypted weekly tapes are transferred to an offsite location each week.
All that for $8/GB/yr. Supposedly that's the cost-neutral point for them including hardware maintenance, salaries, power, cooling, etc.
Re:$40 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:$40 (Score:3, Informative)
I'd also point out that backing virtualization installations with fiber channel is not even remotely uncommon anymore because of the density that the current generation of servers can deliver. Single RMU dual socket six-core x86 machines supporting 10, 15, 20 or more VMs is standard operating procedure these days and without something like 10Gb DCE you're going to be hard pressed to deliver enough IOPS over ethernet via iSCSI. Shit 20 VMs on a single machine at 8Gb/s FC you're talking about splitting up 1GB/s of storage throughput between 20 machines would mean only 50MB/s total throughput distributed evenly between them (fictional case to prove the point). That's a fraction of a single consumer grade SATA drive.
I'd be curious to see you're actual CapEx for acquiring storage. When you consider all of these factors I wouldn't at all be surprised to see something in the $30-$40 per gigabyte range. You'd need to include things like:
- Controllers (cache, licensing, maintenance, etc)
- Assuming 10GbE iSCSI you have to allocate some portion of that cost/management to your storage system
- Redundant systems? Maybe not an issue for your installations?
- Backups (frequency, off-site rotation, etc)
- Cost per square foot (lease(?)/HVAC/power)
- Cost to design/acquire/maintain over lifespan (think storage architect, sales meetings, other soft costs - rough figures are fine obviously)
And as you pointed out, what you can buy at the petabyte scale for let's say $20/GB CapEx could easily be in the $40/GB range for someone acquiring a storage system in the 20TB range. So to make blanket statements like "$40/gig is way more than the capital costs of the storage" is definitely, if I give you absolute benefit of the doubt, misleading at best.