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Are there any links/arctiles that describe an average price for buying/supporting of SAN solution per GB per year?

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closed as too localized by Mark Henderson♦ Jan 12 at 5:52

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3 Answers

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I'd be very surprised if you found any articles of this type because of all of the variables involved, these include but are not limited to;

  • Type of SAN (FC/iSCSI)
  • Manufacturer and model
  • Dual or single controller
  • Controller cache size
  • FC/NIC ports and speed
  • Min/Max capacity of controllers (i.e. number of disks/shelves supported)
  • Type/capacity/speed of disks supported
  • Additional functionality requiring licencing
  • Capacity licencing
  • Support requirements
  • Region/country of supply, vendor and client - all make huge difference to the cost

As you can see there are SO many things that would vary the cost of a given array that combining many models and configs from multiple manufacturers would not only be hard to do once but would be an ongoing job updating every time someone changed anything.

Given this was a very general question do you have a more specific one we could help you with?

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What would be the maximum of that cost? – Andrey Adamovich Jan 4 '10 at 13:26
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Oh dude, you can't have understood my post. If you bought a HDS top-end FC box with cross-site replication and backup, needed SSD speed plus oceans of cache, 24x7x365 support and you only wanted a single GB LUN well I reckon that would cost you about $500k per year - so that's about the most per GB you're likely to come across but honestly that's so unrealistic. – Chopper3 Jan 4 '10 at 14:21
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Chopper really has given you some excellent advice and I suggest you heed it. I do sense you're trying to build a business case for justification of a new SAN versus direct attached storage. In that case, you'd probably want to talk to a reseller as they'd be able to look at your current configuration and help you build out a new solution. At that point you can look at pros/cons and cost per gigabyte. – Mr Furious Jan 4 '10 at 14:36
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up vote 3 down vote

Cost per GB for our systems are $5.42 for one system (FATA drives, in a Fibre Channel array) and $25.68 for another system (FC drives, in a Fibre Channel array). Those costs include backup costs, by the way. And we're not even paying anything for inter-array replication or snapshots. If we did, our costs on the more expensive array would be in the neighborhood of $40 or more.

As you can see, there is a wide spread on prices, for all the reasons Chopper3 pointed out.

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up vote 0 down vote

IMHO, it might be interesting for you to compare the pricing of Amazon S3, and consider the different feature set and what value and disadvantages it will have compared to a SAN solution:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

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S3 and a SAN fill two very different storage niches. – phoebus Jan 4 '10 at 16:17
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