So, you're looking to buy data storage for as cheap as possible
like all of us these days
especially with data growth growing exponentially
and AI projects absolutely eating up the money and budget
that you have for your it organization.
So what do you do about it?
Well, you look at data storage for your on-premise environment
and look at all the different consumption models
and figure out which one is best for you and how can you optimize your TCO,
but you find: should you be buying it traditionally or financing it?
You find that there's options for having hardware maintenance refresh contracts.
Where you have a higher level maintenance and get refreshes over time around SLAs.
You find you can pay-as-you-go with utility or flexible models
or you could buy it as Storage as a Service.
How can you know which one is right for you?
Today I'm going to talk through the four most common ways to purchase data storage in a consumption model,
and then explain the five factors you ought to consider for which one is right for you in your business.
Let's start with traditional purchasing or financing of data storage.
What that looks like is you buy a storage box and then some period of time later usually determined by your depreciation cycles,
or your maintenance contract on these storage devices you refresh that box.
You pay cash up front for that first box. You don't pay for another while,
and then you pay cash again when you refresh that box.
Under traditional there's also the option of financing this just like you might finance a you know large purchase or car over time.
It's a lot like a bank loan but this is the traditional view of it you're refreshing it based off your own cycle.
You're managing that very particularly and that's how you handle it.
The next option is one that's newer to the market. Which is this higher level maintenance contract that includes hardware refreshes.
So just like the traditional, you're purchasing that box up front, and you are paying cash for that, but you're paying cash that covers the hardware box and the maintenance contract you're choosing includes, not just maintenance on that storage box, but also future hardware refreshes around SLAs.
This might be canister only replacements when you need more performance every couple of years,
or this might be more inclusive of SLAs around getting a hardware refresh when you need it, like our storage assurance program.
This you can either pay all up front, you can pay annually, you you can pay quarterly, you can pay monthly, and typically what it is, is a flat rate guarantee. So you have budget certainty getting
that hardware refresh around the automatic SLA when needed.
The next option is the pay as you go model, some vendors call it storage utility, some vendors call it this flexible option,
and with this one you purchase the storage up front,
and you have that box and you choose to refresh it you're the one in control of when to refresh it. It's not around SLAs, but what you agree to is some kind of base payment.
So maybe the base payment is just a half a dollar every year, but then you pay based off of your consumption on top of that base capacity payment.
so maybe in year two you end up using more you had to pay a full dollar. That happened again out here, and as your storage grows
maybe you're paying more and more over that base flat terabyte over time.
gives you room to grow pay as you go,
and something to look for here is what type of offering that client or vendor is giving you with regards to managing this,
so that you can see how much you're using over time and see what kind of payment you can expect.
The last one I'm going to hit is definitely the most common
because it's cloudlike in its model,
which is the storage is a service.
Here you're buying a storage box but, you're buying more of a tier.
You don't really know exactly what box it is,
you just know they've guaranteed some kind of performance for you,
with this and much like this model up here
you're paying for consumption based off of what you're using.
So sometimes you'll pay more. Sometimes you'll pay less.
This consumption is more based off of the terabytes as well, but it's based off of service level agreements.
Whereas this one is more financial in its nature.
One thing to look for in the storage of of service contracts is there's a lot of T's and C's in them as well, as like this contract,
are they making you pay based off of physical capacity or effective capacity?
If your data is extremely reducible is that a benefit you're getting or is that a penalty you could see in the future?
So be looking out for that when you're considering these contracts.
Okay now that you know the basics on how the four of these models work,
let's talk about the five decision criteria you need to think about when deciding which option is best for you and your company.
number one is modernization risk. How modern do you want to stay.
For some your you cases it's all right if you have a box it stores your data and it lasts for a long time,
but some use cases you need to keep up with regulatory requirements or business needs over time,
so you want pretty consistent hardware refreshes which some of these models offer and some of these models do not as well.
The second key factor to consider as budget certainty the dollar signs kind of show that,
but you can see there's flat rate guarantees on some of these.
Whereas some of these your cost could balloon over time,
or your cost could be dependent on whenever you refresh,
so you have to ask for budget approval
every time you want to modernize your equipment.
There's tension between those two.
So, you need to decide what's most important for your use case as a company.
The third one is life cycle management and support experience.
Some of these you're buying a box, you're configuring it,
and then you don't really get that much support
except for what you signed up for until a while later.
Some of these are very hands-on.
You don't even know what storage you're buying.
You just know that you're getting what you were promised,
and so you have to consider how much overhead you want in your lifecycle.
How much personnel you want managing in your own company for that.
The fourth factor is accounting preferences.
Some of these lean more capex, capital expense,
some of these lead more Opex, operational expense.
Which is right for you and your company?
Talk to your accounting division about this, right?
And then the fifth and final factor to consider is what is your storage use case?
Is it changing and growing a lot over time,
or is it extremely predictable?
Some of these allow you to not have to over provision,
and see advantages where you don't have to basically
have a lot of growth that you're paying for,
but some of these are less expensive typically
but you have to manage that capacity growth over time.
So consider which option is right for you there.
Thanks so much for joining today, I hope this gave you a nice introduction
to the consumption models for data storage on-premise purchases,
and which one might be right for you.
Thanks for watching.
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