by Tom Miller
4. January 2010 19:33
Click Here to load the ROI Calculator
While there are a number of ways to calculate ROI when implementing StoragePoint, we thought we'd focus on the simplest and most easily measurable factor: Cost of Storage.
Storage costs make up a large percentage of an IT Budget both in the acquisition and ongoing maintenance. SharePoint stores all of its content within a SQL database which can put a big dent into the budget since SQL clusters typically use some of the most expensive disk in an organization's storage infrastructure. This cost is increased when you figure in the cost of a DBA that is now managing the content that could otherwise exist in a folder on a network. These costs are all quite measurable and therefore make calculating ROI an easy exercise.
The StoragePoint ROI calculator is based on the premise that moving data off tier one storage will save money in both acquisition and monthly operating costs. In many cases this can result in StoragePoint paying for itself almost immediately. There are several other factors that are not accounted for in this calculator that can reduce your overall cost. They include data compression (StoragePoint feature), de-duplication (if supported by the BLOB store hardware), maintenance task simplification, and performance gains.
How much you can save?
To get started you'll need to know a few things. You'll need to know the number of SharePoint web front end servers and your total storage. This can be provided by our BLOBulator tool. The BLOBulator can safely be run on any of your SharePoint servers and it will calculate the amount of storage that can be relocated as well as the required number of StoragePoint licenses. Click the "Calculate ROI" button after running the tool to open the ROI calculator.
You'll also need to have an idea of how much it costs to buy storage as well as operate on a monthly cost per GB for each storage tier you want to utilize. One other thing to note is that we assume that 100% of storage is in tier one when calculating the costs without StoragePoint so it's important to get a good estimate of your monthly operating costs here. This should include DBA costs as well. We've included default values that were based on several conversations with our clients and storage vendors that you can use as a starting point.
Once you have your costs entered into the tiers you can then allocate a percentage of the total storage to different tiers. When all of the storage has been allocated the calculator will display the results. The "Show Graphs" button will provide a report view and also some quick edit options so you can allocate more or less storage to a tier and see how it affects your monthly savings.
Check out the video for more information…
Click Here to load the ROI Calculator
Subscribe