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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?"
Bandwidth? Storage? Backup? Downloads from a particular site? What the hell are we talking about here?
I suppose it all depends on what, and how, you're measuring. Is that money spent on backup tapes, raid systems, flash drives, or what? Is that for offline storage, frame-relay throughput, ISP bandwidth. Does IP telephony get rolled up in that? The question seems a little vague to me.
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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.
Gonzo Granzeau
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I think the OP is talking about total cost of ownership here, not purchase price. TCO is all-inclusive, covering network bandwidth to make use of the space, backup and redundancy, paying someone to keep it running, electricity to keep it spinning, a share of a fileserver box to put it in, etc, etc.
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I thought it was RAM
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$3/Gb/Month
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.
"Depends" is your answer. Though I'm assuming you're talking about disk, not tape nor VTL. Do you buy direct from the manufacturer or through a channel? How big is your company? What's the total installed base so far? General Electric pays much less per GB than some midsize company with 100TB.
Do you mean for SATA disk in a tier2 array or SSD in a tier1 array?
Costs go up when you include snapshots and replication.
Do the editors even ask the submitter to be more specific?
We pay a one time $40 per gigabyte as the capital cost of acquiring the storage. There is no monthly cost. I think $40 is still way too much.
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My boss does.
Stop beeing retards and do internal invoicing. Not like the board of directors is billing "per decision". IT department as a billing self ruling department is so damn stupid. And no one seem to understand it. It is like having a fire department only going to fires that is in line with their mission statement.
And having an it department invocing per GB instead of having a budget for storage and then the company can allocate it as they please. And if someone has a bigger need, it should be a question for the company. Not a matter of giving a profitable it department.
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If it's internal why would you have to pay per year for that?
The 30lb bags of Purina IT Chow are a recurring cost.
"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.
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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Do it yourself. Get almost a petabyte for $7867:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
My answer:
67 terabytes is 67000 Gigabytes.
$7867 / 67000 = 11 cents per gigabyte.
Your mileage may vary.
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What you may be seeing, especially if you are working for a very large company, could just be a cost allocation scheme, not a real money cost as you are thinking of it. If your department brings in revenue, the organization needs to match expenses to it for purposes of Management Accounting.
For instance, imagine you know it costs $X to run one of your cost centers. That dollar amount includes everything from the manpower, the equipment, the facility...everything. Now, they need to assign these costs to the departments that actually make money in a way that makes sense. They could do this by carefully costing out each service they provide and assigning an overhead rate, blah blah. That tends to be a pain. You do it if you have to...but you try not to have to. Another, easier, way of doing it is determining a usage metric (CPU hours, GB of storage, number of tickets) and using that to determine each profit center's percentage allocation of the overall cost.
So, the $60 per GB may not even be close to a market rate for storage. However, if all the departments used twice as much storage next year, the per GB cost might fall to $31 per GB (slightly more than half to account for the fact that there would obviously be more real costs). Conversely, if you convinced your management to contract externally for storage, everyone else might find their per GB cost rise, since the fixed costs would be static.
Full service IT at it's best.
Apostrophe usage at its worst.
We fight with this type of stuff all the time. The market price for things and the amount IT "charges" for the same thing can be way out of line. What I usually see is some large infrastructure investment by IT gets broken up and tacked onto other services charged to the departments that depend on them. Your TB drive may cost $100 but it may be in a high end raid on a server with some fault tolerance attached to a UPS ran by a full team of support. The company can either cover the cost of IT or hand it back to you based on the services you use.
You may be able to get away with getting you own 1TB drive and not paying the IT tax. But if the IT expenses are not being met, they will find other ways to charge you.
I would kind of like to start charging our departments something for network space. It goes unchecked at the moment. I have 16 out of 500 users that use 1/2 of our home folder storage.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
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.
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.
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.
iPhone autocorrection at its normal.
There's a big difference between TCO to the company and whatever price the IT department charges *your* department for service. IT department prices are typically based on historical costs that don't necessarily represent the Moore's Law equivalent precipitous drop in disk space costs, and are often based on gold-brick engineering practices and specialized applications.
For instance, if you're running a high-end database or an Exchange server that's supporting the whole company, it needs to have a blazingly fast SAN array from EMC or somebody, and instead of using $50 1TB SATA drives, it's using $300 15000rpm 300-Gb SAS drives with SSD accelerators and uber-fancy controllers, built into a framework that lets them do maximum IOPS and live no-performance-hit backups. On the other hand, if you're trying to back up desktop data in case of laptop failures, or provide shared file storage where people can retrieve dull bureaucratic standards documents, performance isn't critical, price and volume are, so you want a big slow cheap Network Attached Storage device packed full of TB SATA drives, with a bit of RAID to deal with the occasional drive failure, and still some kind of backup system or maybe a tape-loading robot (if tapes are still even cost-effective.)
And it's not uncommon for IT departments to charge you for the former, even if you'd rather have the latter.
I'm dealing with a variant on this problem right now, for a network management application. The servers and storage in the data center are designed for blazing speed, but the application I'm trying to support is customers who want to archive all their network event data for a couple of years to make Sarbanes and Oxley and their friends happy, so I need fast servers for today's data, maybe something medium-speed for a week's data (but SATA's probably enough), and 98% of my data will never be looked at again but the rules want it online, not in a box of tapes.
Bill Stewart
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Another great way to muddy the waters is to misconstrue the question. You don't have to speculate. There's a difference between a vague question and casting a wide net. The transaction value of a single post is maximized in providing a specific answer to a specific question, whereas the transactional value of a discussion forum is maximized by having many situations and specifics put forward, including scenarios not originally envisioned.
There's at least as many undeclared assumptions in your narrow pedanticism as in the original question.
The question could be more evocative of his actual circumstance, but perhaps the poster was afraid of blowing his cover. Is the net cast on this question so broad that this can't be a useful exchange? Probably, if the question generates more complaints than contributions.
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.
ÕÕ
Backup and redundancy can get awfully expensive, particularly if an online backup product like Evault is used. I don't know if its worth 30 dollars, but it's a pretty fucking good milkshake.
Don't forget salary costs in IT to support it all.
That said, if IT is really using $30 per Gig then they aren't necessarily using the right online backups or tools. Redundancy doesn't cost that much. Geographical redundancy doesn't cost that much. Off-site "vaults" can be pricey, but not that expensive. If I were in the OPs shoes, I'd ask the IT department to share with me how they came up with that number. It's simple and not too confrontational. If their math is fuzzy or their numbers don't make sense, I'd follow up with them justifying that cost. It could just be that there is no IT budget, it all comes out of other budgets through this sort of thing. It could also be that someone has built a very good empire.
Fixed that for you.
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No he wasn't He was talking about the cost he pays to his internal IT for storage. In most companies using a chargeback model for IT services, it does in fact include All of the costs the GP mentioned.
He did not indicate what storage included at his company, however it is not uncommon to include redundancy and backup in some offerings.. $30 for a gigabyte of replicated tier I storage with backup is still high.
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.
Having done the modeling for this, here's some components to consider.
I have one example (AUD) where this works out as follows:
Do the maths above: excluding power, staff, tape libraries and rack space etc, it's already over $25 per usable GB for Tier 1 (and $13.57 in this model for the Tier 3 storage). Redundancy is baked in. Spare disks in the SAN are baked in (so a disk failure means immediate rebuild not "wait 4h until a replacement can be installed by an engineer" rebuild. And for this cost, we also have things like automatic deduplication of data (backup and online), data replication, historical backup to tape and so on and so forth.
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, that's really all you need.
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.