The Economics of Disaggregated Private Cloud Storage
Total Cost of Ownership Analysis of VMware vSAN and Fibre Channel SAN
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Mitch Lewis
Executive Summary
For organizations building private clouds, choosing the right data storage solution is a key decision that can significantly impact the resulting environment. While storage is only a single component of a broader private cloud solution, it plays a key role in determining characteristics such as scalability and flexibility, as well as significantly impacting the operational complexity and overall cost of the solution. IT organizations must be aware of the important role that storage plays in their private cloud environments, and understand the attributes of available storage offerings that may have an impact.
The current data storage landscape includes a wide range of offerings, including both traditional storage arrays, with either scale up or scale out capabilities, and software defined storage solutions, all with varying ranges of performance and advanced feature sets. Beyond the technical capabilities, however, IT decision makers should also be aware of the operational and economic impacts of any solutions under consideration. To make a comprehensive evaluation, IT organizations should consider a range of characteristics including standard hardware, software, and support costs, as well as ongoing operational costs. Evaluation of operational costs requires an analysis of the time, complexity, and staffing involved with deploying and managing a storage solution. To understand the total cost of ownership, all of these considerations should be examined over a defined period of time alongside the context of technology changes and product lifecycles.
This report shows such an approach in evaluating the total cost of data storage solutions for organizations building private and hybrid clouds using VMware Virtual Cloud Foundation (VCF). The study provides an economic comparison between VMware’s vSAN and a Fibre Channel SAN deployment as storage solutions for VCF. The study analyzed publicly available pricing for both solutions, alongside a detailed operational cost analysis, and considerations of financial flexibility over a 5-year period.
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