“Success, the real success, does not depend upon the position you hold but upon how you carry yourself in that position.” Theodore Roosevelt

When is the last time you reviewed your cost of storage? Recently I was meeting with a customer and they wanted to know what their cost per GB was and also their cost of operating their storage infrastructure. At Zerowait, we use a cost estimate of $1.00 a day for each head and $1.00 a day per storage shelf.
When folks ask us to estimate their storage costs we have to ask some questions to ascertain whether they want us to figure fully weighted costs or only acquisition costs and estimated direct operational costs. Some customers of ours can provide with their costs for manpower and their cost allocation for square foot of space. But most of our customers can provide us with acquisition costs .
Even so an analysis we ran recently showed that on a particular filer 7.8% of the filer was being used for MP3 files and almost 10% of the files had not been accessed in over a year. My question is what is it costing to have mainline storage used up by files that are not used or are not relevant to your business operations. I wonder how much it is costing filer users to keep this data in the primary storage assets.