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Internal Costs Per Gigabyte — What Do You Pay?
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?"
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.
"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.
I don't think it's as vague as everyone is making it to be. Since his department is paying the IT department it most likely means data on a windows network through CIFS that is backed up and redundant. This is a common thing.
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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.
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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.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
The $30/month price likely includes an enterprise SAN array (~$150k+), a high-end server fail-over cluster (~$20k-$30k), an enterprise tape backup system (~$80k), a network to connect them all to each other and the users (~$200k), and 4 people's salaries (the SAN admin, the server admin, the backup admin, and the network admin) (~$50k-90k each).
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.
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We pay about $12/GB/year for storage on 15k FC disks with RAID-DP and replicated across town. This does not include backups to tape, that's an extra fee. We are also in the process of working out lower cost storage without replication and on SAS (or SATA) disk. It's really silly to compare consumer grade USB storage to enterprise, replicated and professionally supported storage but it happens all the time.