Computer Technology Review
By Stephen Lawton
Acronis, Inc.
TCO Should Include Value as Well as CostPart 1: Introduction
The conventional wisdom analyzes total cost of ownership (TCO) as determining the direct and indirect costs of purchasing a specific IT component. Direct costs include hardware and software acquisition, power consumption, maintenance and floor space. Indirect costs comprise such expenses as staffing, training, and a variety of items that often might not be immediately associated with the IT product being priced. According to Forrester Research, indirect costs could amount to seven times more than the direct costs themselves. Being able to determine both is what separates value from technology and a wise investment from a crapshoot. TCO of an individual component or component family, such as storage, has to be viewed in a broader perspective. There is little value in storage without data, and having stored data without a working computing environment to access it can be downright infuriating, not to mention cost-ineffective. Despite the sharply lower price of storage on a cost-per-gigabyte scale, storage devices and networks today are one of the most significant expenses in an enterprise. Reducing the TCO of your storage investment will show real and immediate results on the bottom line. A well-organized IT department will address its storage requirements by having the right hardware and software in place. Depending on your enterprise's requirements, this could include investing in uninterruptible and redundant power supplies, external power generators, redundant storage subsystems, and the appropriate software to allow you to recover from a disaster. These are all capital expenses that can be cost-justified using traditional TCO and return on investment (ROI) metrics. But what about the non-capital, indirect expenses-what can you do to reduce those costs? Part 2: Disk Management >>
| 
Acronis Inc. Datensicherungssoftware.