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?"

Comments

Performance, reliability, and price, pick two.

[GoNINzo]

Performance, reliability, and price, pick any two.

High performance and reliable storage tends to be expensive.
High performance and cheap tends to require a lot of maintenance.
Reliable and cheap tends to be really really slow.

So if they are on a SAN with that one gig spread across 50 drives, there are some applications that need that speed.

Re:One idea...

[Cytotoxic]

Sure, if we'd work like this everyone will want to have a 100Gb homedirectory/outlook mailbox/subversion repo whatever. You say go to management and I'll tell you what they'll decide: the teams that make most of the money get it the rest wont. So cut out the middleman and make this common practise by rebilling I say. But then everything should be rebilled (and that's where it goes wrong most of the time: some team rebill and some don't. This effectively means mixing a capitalist and communist society and that don't work....)

This is exactly what happens. If IT resources are "all you can eat" then IT ends up rationing the supply. This works in smaller organizations where IT is heavily involved in the business. As the size of the organization gets larger, having IT deciding priorities between various groups is less desirable.

The inevitable result of unbilled IT is the CEO holding the line on the IT budget while the departments are demanding more and more services. Simple econ101 will tell you what happens next. If you fix supply and decouple demand, you get rationing.

There is an inevitable curve as companies get larger and larger:

1. IT handles everything
2. resources become constrained and an executive group attempts to prioritize IT projects
3. internal billing and budgeting is used to prioritize IT resources
4. Numbers used for internal billing are used to justify outsourcing and/or mini IT departments spring up inside divisions.
5. outsourcing/distributed IT produces mixed results and added complexity - so IT is insourced.