So on several occasions, I have written about Storage management and the cost reduction associated with it in terms of CapEx and OpEx. In this blog post we will talk about how your organization may further be able to leverage resources available in the industry to reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and improve ROA (Return on Assets) for the storage devices you own.
For example purposes, lets assume we are only talking about one single Storage device (frame) in the environment. Also for this blog post, lets assume the manufacturer (OEM) of the Storage frame is the vendor.
The concept of Hardware Maintenance
You purchased a storage asset 3 years ago. Spend a million dollars in acquisition cost on that storage device, also paid for software licenses, implementation cost, migration cost and training cost. You are almost at a 2 million dollar mark to implement this Enterprise Class Storage, which includes your Tier1 and / or Tier 2 data.
How is this Storage frame doing today?
It’s working great, applications associated with it are robust, Thank God over the past 3 years we haven’t seen any outages in this environment.
Oh…………by the way, the vendor just visited today and is proposing we do a tech refresh in this environment.
The Strategy related to Hardware Maintenance
So the first question, are you ready for this tech refresh?
Is your business ready for this tech refresh?
Is your team ready and trained for this new technology?
Do you need external resources for this tech refresh?
Are there budgets and proposed growth in the business to pay for this tech refresh?
Do we really need a tech refresh?
Are your applications ready for this tech refresh?
Would your host environments be ready for this tech refresh?
What is that you are trying to gain by this tech refresh — Processing Power, Speed, Savings, Green Data Center, Power, Electricity, management cost, etc?
Are your users complaining about your application performance?
Is the number of users growing on these apps?
So how many Nah’s and Yah’s do we have on the questions above?
The Facts about Hardware Maintenance
The vendor is proposing a substantial savings and helping us reduce the TCO on these assets over the next three years.
Cost of hardware maintenance from the vendor for year 4, year 5 and year 6 (on the existing storage asset) is almost equivalent to the cost of purchasing new assets
We are being offered the best deal, free training, the vendor reduced the hardware acquisition cost by 20% and they have another 5% discount for the quarter closing tomorrow.
The beliefs about Hardware Maintenance
Hardware Support: No one other than the vendor can provide hardware support on the Storage assets because it is just too complex to manage.
Remote Support and Diagnostics: No one other than the vendor can provide remote support and diagnostics.
Code Upgrades (Firmware) and Engineering Support: No one other than the vendor can provide Code upgrades and Engineering Support.
Global Technical Support: No one other than the vendor has a 24 x 7 global technical support.
Onsite Certified & Trained Engineers: Only the vendor has trained and certified onsite engineers.
Spares: 24 x 7, 4 hour response spare parts logistics, only the vendor has it.
SLA: Only the vendor can provide a mission critical or a premium SLA that would include either 24 x 7 x 2 support or 24 x 7 x 4 support.
Software Support: No one other than the vendor can provide Software support
So, how do you get around these industry notions?
Please stay tuned for the next blog post on Storage Economics — Hardware Maintenance — Part 2 tomorrow.
