Transitioning to a New Storage Acquisition Model
Executive Summary
Many enterprise IT administrators are currently in the process of transforming their infrastructures to emphasize services delivery. Some may call it a transformation to cloud-‐based services—private and hybrid—while others may not. But finding ways to call it a transition to the cloud is not really the point. The objective of transformation is to stand up a services delivery engine that can simultaneously support existing applications while delivering new mobile, social, and analytics applications.
However, these same administrators, while believing that transformation will allow for better and more agile services delivery at lower cost per application, are finding that they must first increase spending on servers, networking and storage. It is clear that, as new infrastructure is acquired to transform enterprise IT into a services engine, the cost to get there is now a critical consideration.
Here we look at a new storage architectural model called bi-dimensional scaling and examine it in the light of total cost of ownership (TCO). We point out that bi‐dimensional scaling can extend the time horizon used in TCO modelling from 3-4 years to 7-10 years to give a more accurate picture of cost for long-term and sustainable services delivery. As a result, the overall cost for the kind of storage systems needed to support transformation can be reduced vs. using more traditional models. We base this study on NetApp’s FAS8000 Series as a storage platform that offers non-disruptive, bi-dimensional scaling.
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