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Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
for Enterprise Storage

TCO Components

  • Purchase or lease costs including maintenance and services charges
  • Software license costs including maintenance and services charges
  • Environmental costs including power, air conditioning and floor space
  • Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS)
  • Data migration and training costs
Alinean Original pioneers of ROI, TCO and value measurement and selling tools
CIOview's TCOnow! for DiskTCOnow! for Disk
is a software tool that will help you determine whether, and by how much, the prices listed for disk hardware underestimate the actual cost of a new disk array. By answering a limited number of questions, TCOnow! will generate a Total Cost of Ownership comparison for purchasing a new disk array or consolidating an existing disk array sold by EMC, HDS, HP, or IBM. You can compare these disk arrays with and without advanced function software such as point in time copy, remote copy, performance analysis, storage area network (SAN) management, and even mainframe optimization.
CIOview's TCOnow! for Enterprise StorageTCOnow! for Enterprise Storage
will help you decide whether and how to consolidate your existing direct attached storage as well as any existing EMC, HDS, IBM, or other Fibre Channel arrays. By answering a limited number of questions, TCOnow! will generate a Total Cost of Ownership comparison for consolidating one to ten heterogeneous storage arrays into an enterprise SAN. You can compare acquisition and operational costs alone or including SAN switches and directors, storage virtualization, even data recovery software.

Availability, there are usually five classes defined as:

  • "mission critical" (where the data must be available 99.999% of the time - the "five-nines" level of protection equates to 5 minutes downtime per year)
  • "business vital" (99.99% availability = 53 minutes downtime per year)
  • "mission important" (99.9% or 9 hours per year)
  • "important for productivity" (99% or 3.6 days per year)
  • "not important to operation" (90% or 36 days per year)

Reliability and recovery time objectives (RTO) are defined as the maximum time allowable for recovering data:

  • mission critical data the RTO (taken as .00001 of the total year) is 1.5 minutes
  • business vital data the RTO is 15 minutes
  • mission important data the RTO is two hours
  • data important for productivity the RTO is one day
  • data not important to operation the RTO is one week

Serviceability involves planned and unplanned outages due to:

  • parts replacement
  • microcode patches and upgrades
  • single points of failure in the design

Criteria
 Availability Downtime/year Recovery time
Mission Critical
99.999%
5 minutes
1.5 minutes
Business Vital
99.99%
53 minutes
15 minutes
Mission Important
99.9%
9 hours
2 hours
Important
99%
3.6 days
1 day
Not Important
90%
36 days
1 week
Table and Definitions in PDF format

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