I was shooting pool in Latrobe, PA recently with a friend and customer and we got to talking about the relative costs of computer storage for his company. This has been an on going discussion for many months and in many different locations . Over several months we have discovered that it is actually very hard to nail down the costs of storage in a large company. How do you account for staff per TB of storage? How do you account for operational expenses like heat, light, cooling, electric per TB of storage?

I started asking these same questions of some of our other customers, and now we have a whole bunch of people trying to figure out how can a company accurately charge your expense overhead to your storage infrastructure?

A follow up question to ask your vendors at time of purchase is what is the maintenance and support costs of the storage going to be for the lifespan of the storage equipment. These costs have a direct affect on the cost of your storage management.

What does it cost to run storage equipment for storage that is never or rarely accessed? How much does that cost in electricity? It seems logical that higher storage density should be less expensive to operate. But is it? Perhaps some of our readers can help us to answer these questions?

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