How to Calculate Flash Storage TCO

Ted Schmidt — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 01:17:04 +0000

Across a wide range of consumer devices, from cameras to smartphones to laptops, flash storage has become the de facto standard for digital data storage. Because of its relative compactness, speed and low power consumption, flash storage also has experienced dramatic growth in enterprise data storage solutions. While initial use cases were somewhat limited, flash storage in the enterprise has expanded in many areas, which in no small way is related to the cost of flash storage dropping more than 80% in the past five years.

Compared to spinning disk systems (HDDs), enterprise systems using flash can use fewer storage devices to deliver comparable performance levels and require less cooling, simply because they have fewer moving parts. Consolidating storage like this allows enterprises to reduce power usage costs, maintenance costs and other costs as well.

Unfortunately, many enterprises miss out on these savings because they still rely on acquisition cost as the deciding factor when looking at storage solutions. Even with the incredible drops in acquisition costs of flash storage, it still can run five times more than HDD solutions, which can seem attractive when acquisition cost is the only consideration.

However, if you look at the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as a sum of the initial capital layout for a storage solution, plus all the other costs associated with the full lifecycle of the storage solution, industry studies agree that acquisition costs account for only about 20% of TCO. Other lifecycle costs like performance, power usage, reliability, maintenance and various factors, account for the other 80% of TCO, so it is important to consider those factors in a buying decision for any storage solution. Let’s take a quick look at some of the costs that make up 80% of your TCO.

Maintenance and repair costs are probably the most obvious in your TCO. HDDs have a failure rate of anywhere from 2-8%, meaning that every year, you can expect to lose one drive for every 12 deployed. That is significant, especially when you consider that the cost to replace a failed drive includes system down-time and labor to replace the drive, in addition to the cost of the replacement drive itself.

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