Do you understand all the pieces of the puzzle pertaining to your in-house storage costs?  Raw versus usable?  Upfront versus all-in?

We recently looked up analyst storage cost estimates for a white paper comparing HubStor pricing to in-house storage costs.

Gartner's figures

According to Gartner, “the annual cost per raw TB of storage in 2014 was $2,520”.  But be careful here.  Notice that said 'raw' storage.  Raw is your purchased capacity before things like RAID and vendor hold back, etc.  It isn't exactly what you get.  It's actually far from your actual usable capacity.  By some estimates usable ends up around 60% of the raw capacity purchased.  Ouch! (By the way, this raw versus usable issue isn't relevant to cloud storage).

ESG Global's figures

A report ESG did comparing Microsoft StorSimple costs to a typical in-house disk array gave us some insight too.  Figures from ESG Global peg the all-in annual cost per usable terabyte at $4,025 [adjusting their 3 year cost of $603,778 for 50TB].

Forrester Research's figures

Forrester Research places the fully-loaded annual cost per usable terabyte at $9,555 [adjusting their annual cost of $955,500 for 100TB].  While Forrester's figure seems just a little over the top I have personally talked with multiple storage professionals at Fortune 1000 companies where this all-in storage cost was a proven reality.

Gartner also says that data management software for in-house storage can run $1,000/TB for metadata analysis only to $5,000/TB for content analysis, including full-text indexing.  Interesting: the analyst estimates include such software in their storage cost models.

Bottom line: storage isn't cheap in the enterprise.  Check out our whitepaper from the pricing page and the work Forrester did for a deeper dive on what goes into the "fully-burdened" storage cost model.