Difficult economic times require new approaches and strategies for reducing the cost of storage infrastructure investments. The past several years of IT procurement have left many IT organisations with underused and oversubscribed storage capacities. Now, with a squeeze on capital and credit, many organisations are faced with edicts to do more with less.

Storage Economics presents a major shift in the way companies assess their storage requirements and investment returns, from one focused on capital expenditure to the true ownership cost. These days the capital cost typically equates to just 20% of the total cost of ownership over 3 to 4 years, understanding the other 80% - the operational expense - is essential to containing and reducing the overall costs.

Operational costs typically include areas such as electricity, floor space, people, risk of downtime, and hardware and software maintenance licenses, to name but a few. Hitachi Data Systems has characterised 33 different types of storage costs. By working with customers to establish their priorities for cost reduction, we help the customer to evaluate alternative initiatives to reduce total costs. These may include storage consolidation, virtualisation, tiered storage, disaster protection, backup improvements and management automation as examples. These initiatives or investments can be mapped directly to the 33 types of costs that will create a total cost reduction.

Storage Economics is a comprehensive methodology and we recognise that many of our customers want to enter into discussions at different levels of engagements. Typically, customers benefit from:

• Quick Estimator Assessment: A simple light assessment of your current economic architecture using our Storage Economics Quick Estimator Tool we can quickly calculate your potential storage savings. Many of our customers find this in itself a sufficient way to identify pragmatic cost saving solutions.
• One Day Workshop: This workshop presents you and your relevant stakeholders with the total potential cost savings and helps you understand the implications when applying alternative architecture models to your data centre.
• Detailed Storage Economics Assessment: A full assessment includes a one day introductory workshop to explain our Storage Economics concept. This is followed by one week of onsite consulting engagements which consist of in-depth interviews with key stakeholders from your business. Our experts use these findings to prepare a detailed report that document’s the results as well as a financial model that compares your current architecture to alternatives, enabling you to select the right approach to building an economically superior storage architecture for future growth.

Contact Trustco for further information.