Smart Infrastructure - The Benefits: Case Study

Part one: Commercials

Working with several clients lately, examining the real value of a SmartInfrastucture approach, we share here some of our findings.  From a commercial perspective alone, the numbers are astonishing.  Not just acquisition cost, but the nature of reducing costs over time while improving performance has presented beyond compelling business cases time and again.

The comparisons we make here are based on real-world figures, from a live production environment. 

Server embedded, cloud managed SmartInfrastructure does not easily compare to, for example, dual controller based external storage arrays, or even all-flash SSD clusters. This is down to the inherent design principal differences, but we can look at overall commercials and in-life management and where significant advantage can be found.

This is the first of a three-part study that looks at the following value elements of a SmartInfrastructure approach:

Part one: Commercials

Acquisition costs, upgrade costs, power consumption, rack space.

Part two: Simplicity

Host technology, licensing deployment,  in-life management.

Part 3: Speed & agility

Capacity upgrade process, inherent security, multiple services on common platform, sustainability.

Part one: Commercials

Historically, right sizing of storage arrays up front for anticipated capacity requirements was a crystal-ball exercise.  Vendors offer discounts for volume, often based on financial year timing and quota reasons.  The ‘end of fiscal year fire sale’ is a tedious, predictable commercial exercise, mainly benefitting vendor salespeople, often to the long-term detriment of their clients. 

Firstly, the unpredictable nature of pricing and order volume dependent discounts does not allow for integrity of a business model.  This is particularly true for service providers where predictability is crucial to managing margins on product lines dependent on underlying storage assets.  It’s great to get a ‘deal’ because its <insert vendor name’s>  Q4, but can these prices be repeated six months later?  Maybe, probably not though.

Predicting sales or data growth is tough enough month by month, year by year its next to impossible, especially when offering any kind of elastic XaaS to a market.  So inevitably capacity has been over procured, with large capex spends, and actual monetization occurring deep into service life, if at all.

Modular, scale up/scale out, all flash solutions improved this position, allowing more granularity in initial deployment, and increased predictability of pricing.  Most solutions however were either pod or cluster configured and still required a minimum specification of ‘blocks’ to be procured when capacity was required.

This approach was a significant improvement over crystal-balling controller based external storage arrays.  Next generation SPU based, offload solutions however, go a step further in predictability, granularity and simplicity.

So, let’s look at the numbers.  Using a Nebulon configuration there are simply two line items to consider at acquisition:  The SPU card (one required per server host) and management software subscription (again one per server host).  Note here, licensing is per physical host and not capacity dependent.  This allows for future capacity upgrades at ultra-low cost.

Working with a thirteen-host environment in this example, depreciated over 60 months compared to acquisition cost of an all-flash SSD based solution of a similar size.  Server specification remains consistent between both build examples, with each SmartInfrastructure server host configured with six 8Tb SSD’s.

Straight dollar acquisition costs see an approximate 40% reduction for SPU based SmartInfrastructure build Vs all-flash SSD.  Also, 18RU reduction in DC space, and associated 4.9Kwh power reduction.

Here comes the fun part! By modifying the SSD configuration in the same hosts from six 8Tb SSDs to twelve 8Tb SSD’s we see the following:

Acquisition cost for SPU rises due to additional capacity (remains significantly below all-flash option) but critically capacity is now three times larger than the all-flash option.  Depreciated over the same 60-month period this represents an approximate 80% reduction in $/GB costs vs all-flash.

Hosts specified in the example are based on 2U recognized vendor configurations, allowing for up to 24 SSDs per host.

Conclusion

The commercials alone of an SPU based SmartInfrastructure deployment are compelling.  In parts two and three we will look at Simplicity and Agility and the game changing value an SPU deployment can bring when upgrading and delivering in-life services.

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