Operational costs are often the single biggest factor businesses consider when selecting a data center storage solution. Scale out storage has slowly gained acceptance across multiple industries as a potential replacement for the traditional NAS storage found in data centers. While scale out storage consistently requires a lower initial investment, it can only be widely adopted in data centers if the operational costs are comparable or less than traditional storage methods.
Differences in the Operational Cost Curve
A key characteristic of scale out storage is the ability to connect multiple, non-identical servers into a single namespace. This allows businesses to minimize management costs in their data center. Through virtualization and management automation, the size and space needed in the data center can be decreased. Automation also allows businesses to carry less IT staff because many of the day to day maintenance activities are taken care of automatically. Traditional NAS storage in a data center requires each appliance to be managed individually. This forces the operational costs to increase proportional to the size and scale of the storage environment.
Data Availability
Traditional NAS storage used in data centers can have problems guaranteeing elite levels of data availability. To achieve this, administrators must keep operational procedures fresh and ready to be used at a moment’s notice in case a disaster strikes. Over time, this becomes a significant investment of both time and personnel. It can also significantly increase long-term data center energy costs. Scale out storage consistently provides high levels of data availability which makes it ideal for disaster recovery. Utilizing local and remote automated replication minimizes long-term labor costs.
Ongoing Maintenance Expenses
Maintenance expenses related to storage hardware and software in a data center are often one of the largest components of operational costs, especially when using an off-site data center. Some businesses view maintenance expenses as an operational cost, while others consider it a capital cost. In a data center, traditional NAS storage requires a larger percentage of the capital investment to be put towards the storage hardware. On the other hand, scale out storage will require more ongoing maintenance costs. A majority of the ongoing maintenance costs are tied to maintaining commodity servers and any necessary software subscriptions.
Scale-out storage can lead to a decrease in data center operational costs when compared to traditional storage methods. This is achieved by minimizing management expenses through virtualization, utilizing automation to reduce staffing requirements, and ensuring a high level of data availability.
Traditional NAS storage does have an edge in the area of ongoing maintenance costs. Scale-out storage in a data center typically has higher maintenance costs because commodity servers are used. To save on initial capital costs, businesses often end up servers from multiple manufacturers which make the maintenance costs more variable. The specific maintenance costs can only be determined on a case by case basis; however business can take a number of steps, especially during the hardware purchasing phase, to minimize this expense. There is some debate about whether or not the long-term operational costs of scale-out storage is significantly less than traditional storage, however most experts agree it will rarely be noticeably more than traditional storage methods.
This is a guest post by Andy Richards. Andy believes there are many factors to consider when evaluating data centers and colocation pricing. His articles educate readers about the features that set different data centers apart.
