The total cost of software-defined storage

In the current economic climate, the cost of everything is often closely examined to be sure we’re not paying too much. However, many focus on just the cost of acquisition – the capital expenditure – as opposed to looking at the bigger picture – the total cost of ownership, or TCO.

In the world of IT, it’s easy to forget that the cost of owning servers, networking and storage equipment is more than the purchase price of the hardware. The total cost also includes installation, software licenses, service, support, training and upgrades amongst other things.

Storage growth shouldn’t hurt

It may be stating the obvious somewhat, but the amount of data that we’re producing and storing has grown to the point that many companies are regularly upgrading their storage environment to cope with this growth. These upgrades can be painful and costly, but here at SUSE, we believe that storage growth shouldn’t hurt, and we’ve produced a whitepaper that talks about this.

We asked the team at IT Brand Pulse to put together some TCO case studies to look at the total cost of ownership of disk-to-disk backup and archiving to object storage, and of flash-based object storage. They looked at a number of the leaders in the software-defined storage market and compared them all to show the total cost of ownership over five years across hardware, software and services.

If your data storage is getting out of control, perhaps it’s time to look at moving to software-defined storage. These reports will help you to understand the TCO across a number of platforms so that you can weigh them up and make the right decision for your business. If you’re still unsure of what the right option is for your business, then speak to one of the team at SUSE and let us reduce the pain of your storage growth.