Posted on Wednesday, November 9, 2016 in Cloud Storage, Storage, Storage Hardware, Enterprise Storage
New research from industry analysts IDC confirms what CDS has been telling its customers for years – software defined storage systems offer a significant cost advantage over equivalent NAS storage. In their white paper The Economics of Software-Defined Storage (PDF, 646kB) IDC suggest that the savings may be even greater than many CTOs expected.
The Red Hat example
Taking Red Hat’s Gluster Storage platform as an example, researchers found that the SDS approach was 46 percent cheaper than an equivalent 300TB NAS system at initial purchase. Over the course of five years, the total cost of SDS was 39 percent lower.
The differences were even greater when the capacity of the unit increased. A 500TB storage platform was 53 percent cheaper over the course of a five-year life-span.
The factor IDC neglected
Because the IDC research focused on headline costs of Red Hat SDS, it was unable to account for the secondary savings available to adopters. Choosing a software-defined platform gives your business far greater control of its infrastructure – you are free to break out of your vendor-defined upgrade cycle for instance.
The vendor agnostic nature of SDS also allows you to build a best-of-breed storage platform that suits your needs and budget. This flexibility means you can redeploy post-warranty assets to provide additional capacity. Or to adopt new technologies (like flash) to provide a tiered storage platform that grows in line with your performance needs.
In fact, redeploying post warranty assets as part of an SDS storage infrastructure could reduce headline costs further still.
Whether your business considers the secondary benefits of SDS or not, the headline savings presented by IDC cannot be ignored. A 53 percent reduction in storage costs provides significant funds for reinvestment in other strategic IT projects. Or to increase your baseline storage capacity moving forwards.
For more help and advice about realising significant cost savings from SDS storage, please get in touch.
– See more at: http://www.cds.net/blog/2016/11/idc-confirms-software-defined-storage-is-cheaper/#sthash.uFDNLWZq.dpuf