Surging
TCO Costs
It’s easy to suppose that somehow more disk storage and technological
advances will ease the cost of managing this tidal wave of new data. However,
as Figure 2 indicates, even with the expected continuation in RAID price/TB
decline, the total expenditure necessary to accommodate the projected
data growth will escalate more than tenfold in the next five years.
To be consistent with the data in Figure 1, Figure 2 uses the following
numbers:
A 1999 total storage starting point of three terabytes of serviced data,
which grows at a rate of 150% per year
$300K/TB
as the starting cost of disk storage
A
decline in storage costs of 30% per year, which is the figure projected
by most analysts, including IDC, Gartner, and META
An
expenditure calculation that uses a total cost of ownership (TCO) composite,
which takes into account the hardware price/TB plus overhead factors
for storage and data management tools and services.
The
message expressed in Figure 2 is startling. Over the next five years,
given a sixfold decrease in price/TB and a hundredfold increase in data,
you can expect a thirteenfold increase in total data management costs.
