|
Many factors contribute to the ownership cost for enterprise storage. These include (but are not limited to): physical capacity relative to physical space requirements, performance capacity for data transfer and system reaction time, software maintenance and updates, expandability and flexibility, hardware purchase price, software licensing costs, hardware expansion or upgrade costs, administrator training, power utilization, day-to-day management costs, and third-party costs for installation, configuration, and integration. Three of these factors — training, power utilization and day-to-day management — have a large and increasingly critical impact on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) today. Edison has developed an approach to TCO analysis that recognizes the need for all companies to more easily manage the increasing rate at which change takes place in their data center environment. The approach focuses on day-to-day management, based on our belief that a user-friendly storage management interface, in conjunction with a virtualized array architecture, can lower administrative training costs and dramatically improve administrator efficiency in that area. Edison’s approach also takes into account the trend in which lower-skilled, lower cost IT generalists are used for most day-to-day storage management tasks, thereby reserving specialists and highly paid staff for mission-critical tasks and more complex challenges. Finally, Edison’s approach recognizes that customers are increasingly using mid-range storage such as the HP EVA to meet their expanding storage needs with an easily administered system. This study demonstrates how the superior user interface and virtualization offered by the HP EVA storage system can provide organizations with the benefits of higher administrative efficiency combined with the potential ability to utilize less expensive human resources. Edison analysts put the management software of an HP EVA system through a series of typical day-to-day storage management tasks. The same tasks were also evaluated on similar systems from NetApp and EMC. Edison’s analysis shows that, when performing the list of tasks, the HP EVA required 70 percent fewer steps than EMC and 82 percent fewer steps than NetApp, with 79 percent less time than EMC and 76 percent less time than NetApp for performing a series of standard administrative tasks. Depending on the operation performed, the EVA demonstrated up to 5 times the management efficiency of EMC and NetApp.
These average savings can be interpreted in several ways, depending upon the nature of an organization’s IT infrastructure. For example, using the popular metric of TB/FTE (Terabytes per Full Time Employee), an organization can conservatively expect an administrator to manage at least twice and possibly three times the terabytes of storage than with the other platforms. Our research demonstrates that this greater administrative efficiency, realized through a superior user interface and virtualization architecture, make the HP EVA storage solution a preferred storage choice with lower overall cost of ownership than other systems on the market.
This report is based on a combination of hands-on evaluation, review of relevant published documents on storage cost of ownership, and reports on data center and storage administrator salaries.
Who Should Read This Report
This report should be read by anyone responsible for choosing storage solutions for their organizations or for making administrative personnel decisions in the data center.
Methodology Overview
Edison analysts performed the series of tasks described in this white paper on storage systems from EMC, HP, and NetApp. The hardware and software evaluated are listed within the document and in the appendices.
|
