How IT managers avoid excessive storage costs

How much does a TB of storage cost?

A webcast of the Computerwoche shows how CIO circumvent the storage cost trap.

How much does a TB of storage cost?

The Corona crisis also touches on the topic of storage: storage managers need new procurement models. What these look like, explains a webcast of the computer week. Markus Grau, Principal Systems Engineer at Pure Storage, shows how Cios use storage on demand and flexibly - regardless of the question of public cloud or their own data center. Specialist journalist Thomas Hafen von der Computerwoche moderates the webcast.

Storage is an "unloved task" - this thesis of the moderator does not want to leave gray." "In the end, it’s not about storage, it’s about data," he stresses. Whichever way you turn it - a survey among viewers identifies a whole series of major challenges: 53 percent are struggling with difficult growth, 41 percent each in addition with the commission and the fact to manage a migration every three to five years. Further difficulties lie in storage management in hybrid cloud environments or in the CAPEX budget.

The major changes that Grau is observing in storage are, on the one hand, the trend from Data Lake to more real-time data analytics and, on the other, the cloud. Many IT decision-makers are currently wondering whether they will not be pushing more and more workloads into the public cloud in two to three years, which makes the current planning even more difficult.

Risk of innovation congestion

The status quo for many companies is characterized by forced maintenance, the Forklift Tech Refresh and repeated purchases or a scale-out "node decay", continues Grau. The whole thing results in high costs, migrations and often in a backlog of innovation. Another survey shows that viewers of traditional storage provider models mainly face rising maintenance prices (32 percent), double costs and risks from forced migration (29 percent) and additional costs from restrictive license models (14 percent) are annoyed.

"The well-known models in the storage industry meant that you often had to buy licenses," confirms Grau. And because of the costs, innovation functionalities are then considered optional." But users also need innovations from the storage sector," he says, "storage systems can help with many innovations."

What companies actually want is a model that works like Software-as-a-Service, the expert continues. This also touches on the question of OPEX instead of CAPEX, put colloquially: you just want to pay for the real use of storage." "The trend towards subscription models has been emerging for quite some time," observes Grau."Users no longer want to commit themselves for so long."

Risk of innovation congestion

The status quo for many companies is characterized by forced maintenance, the Forklift Tech Refresh and repeated purchases or a scale-out "node decay", continues Grau. The whole thing results in high costs, migrations and often in a backlog of innovation. Another survey shows that viewers of traditional storage provider models mainly face rising maintenance prices (32 percent), double costs and risks from forced migration (29 percent) and additional costs from restrictive license models (14 percent) are annoyed.

"The well-known models in the storage industry meant that you often had to buy licenses," confirms Grau. And because of the costs, innovation functionalities are then considered optional." But users also need innovations from the storage sector," he says, "storage systems can help with many innovations."

What companies actually want is a model that works like Software-as-a-Service, the expert continues. This also touches on the question of OPEX instead of CAPEX, put colloquially: you just want to pay for the real use of storage." "The trend towards subscription models has been emerging for quite some time," observes Grau."Users no longer want to commit themselves for so long."

What hiring or leasing has to do with OPEX and CAPEX

But the transformation into an as-a-service model doesn’t happen overnight, many companies still have old contracts. There are also other hurdles: the public cloud offers only limited enterprise features, or the decision-maker fears a vendor lock-in." "Not every customer is cloud-ready," says Grau. The question must be: Can I implement my entire data availability and process requirements one-to-one? The ideal would be a model with short running times and buffer capacities.

A stumbling block is also hidden in the language. What exactly means "leasing", what exactly "renting" - decision-makers have to look very closely at what the accounting rules show as OPEX and what as CAPEX. Some companies break this up and register parts in OPEX and parts in CAPEX.A sticking point: Where are the systems? In the books of the user or the provider?

According to Pure Storage, it is possible to switch from OPEX to CAPEX without interrupting the server and the applications." We offer a move, "says Grau.The subscription model "Evergreen Storage" is an all-inclusive model according to him. Important: Monitoring and monitoring functionalities provide an overview of data growth and cost transparency. Grau concludes: "Unpleasant surprises should be spared!"