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Why is business-class storage so expensive?

The infrastructure team at my company charges $10,000 per TB for storage costs. They charge this to us (internal) when we have new projects and need more disk.

Are we paying too much? Obviously a broad question, but please help out if you can.

They claim we get 200,000-300,000 IOPS with response time as low as .05ms.

Can we get close to that kind of performance for less $? Lets say we just need performance 1/3 as good, how much should that cost?

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How can we possibly answer that? It's not like there is a single SAN vendor with a single spec for disks, cabling, and HBAs. – MDMarra Dec 14 '11 at 18:43
It was closed because it's off-topic, really. We don't do shopping questions and we don't do open-ended or discussion oriented questions. Closing it as a dupe to that question is throwing you a bone so that you can see some reasons why it's so expensive. In its current form, there is absolutely no way we can answer it since we aren't on your infrastructure team. – MDMarra Dec 14 '11 at 18:50
For that amount of IOPS, you are probably looking at a Fusiondrive. fusionio.com/platforms/iodrive2 A Google search suggests the 640GB model is only $9,500. – Zoredache Dec 14 '11 at 18:58
The posted dupe, assumes that the price is worth it already. So basically says, yes this stuff costs alot. Ignores the actual cost. I understand the point about not being a shopping site, although I would have thought some pointers to low cost high performance enterprise class storage would be useful for all. I guess not. We will just pay through the nose and thank all you great infrastructure guys. Sorry, feeling burned for having question closed. Might want to re-think that approach for first time posters. – Kirk Dec 14 '11 at 19:02
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This question is crappy because you are asking the wrong thing. Instead of asking about some internal accounting numbers, you should be trying to figure out what kind of storage characteristics you actually need. Then simply call a dozen storage vendors and ask them for a quote. If you don't know how to determine your requirements, that might be a valid question if you can provide enough details. – Zoredache Dec 14 '11 at 19:12
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closed as exact duplicate by Bart De Vos, SvenW, Scott Pack, Chris S♦, Holocryptic Dec 14 '11 at 18:46

This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

1 Answer

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10K/TB doesn't just go for the hardware. Its for:

  1. Guaranteed support from the vendors 24/7.
  2. Day to day management of the array, including backups, restores and disaster recovery.
  3. Reliability and stability.

Given the choice between building my own solution or going with the infrastructure team, I would go with the latter. If there is an issue with cost, I would suggest that you let your manager take care of that matter.

(Frankly, where I come from, 10K is a bargain. :))

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Item 2 doesn't count. Remember this is our internal Infrastructure team, they get paid to maintain that stuff and those costs are not part of the $10k. – Kirk Dec 14 '11 at 18:50
In that case, go buy an XIV on your own dime :) Oh, and don't forget about cost of FC adapters, the SAN itself, etc. It all adds up, though 10K/TB sounds a little high. – MikeyB Dec 14 '11 at 18:52
Its my manager that is pushing back on these costs, that's the whole point. Also, never said anything about building my own solution. The issue is whether we are being over charged by our own team. Yes, you get more reliability/stability, but $10k/Tb is still a lot. Its basically 100x the consumer version of storage. I can understand 10x not 100x. – Kirk Dec 14 '11 at 18:53
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@Kirk Google has a massively customized software stack that is designed from the ground up to take advantage of monstrous amounts of commodity hardware. They are an extreme edge case and your argument about that doesn't hold water. They've put millions into the cost of salaries of their engineers to design a platform that will work on that hardware. I doubt your application vendor has done the same. – MDMarra Dec 14 '11 at 19:11
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This guys being wacked unfairly. Basically being quoted a part of a large SAN array, so IOPS for SAN is high, but IOPS for individual drive is probably just 175 or something. So he's paying for a large part of a SAN array/controller/etc but thinks he's just paying for a 1TB drive. The point is that there are real infrastructure points to make here, and its quite possible he could use some alternatives to the SAN array and should explore that. – Fraggle Dec 15 '11 at 12:07
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