By now it is common knowledge for those who find themselves still employed in the South African IT sector that we have certainly been hit by the global recession, no matter who keeps telling us we have been sheltered from it. Thanks, Trevor!
The days of picking up the phone to place orders are gone; we now need to account for every rand spent. In addition, we find ourselves increasingly asked to justify storage spend.
Requirements to validate total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) are the norm for just about every purchase and, on top of that, there is an expectation the predicted numbers are actually achieved. With all the hype manufactures are able to produce, what should a company be looking for in its tenders to ensure it doesn't get fleeced by statistics or marketing?
As the old adage: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” suggests, people can prove whatever they want if they input the metrics - but there are things to look out for when reviewing offerings.
Be aware of the following:
Total cost of ownership
A TCO exercise can be helpful. However, one of the common problems is that the figures are based on what the vendor perceives the costs (often dollar-based) and resources to be, and the numbers can then be used to inflate the apparent cost of a competitor's product.
This tactic is often used to justify replacing infrastructure a company already owns by increasing upgrade and out-of-warranty service costs, making an outright purchase seem the only option.
When doing a TCO exercise, make sure to use the company's own numbers and shop around for year four and five support costs to get a more realistic view of the cost models available on extended support.
Where possible, try to break down the review to the basics, equating how much useable storage the company needs for its data and whether the solution reaches the performance requirements for the environment.
Make sure to compare the required features and functionality. It is common for a comparison to be loaded with features - and not just those used. The more features added, the better the TCO becomes. Always specify what features and functionality should be used to do the calculations for the company's environment.
Return on investment
This is also a useful measurement to decide what solution should be invested in; however, a lot of similar issues can be encountered.
What must be kept in mind when reviewing the figures is to make sure they are local and relevant, as it can be difficult to get accurate figures for power and cooling. The vendor will often provide a company with figures, and this leaves room to use numbers that may be extreme. While it may take some effort, try to determine actual costs or, alternatively, get pricing from a local hosting entity and use this to give a balanced comparison across offerings.
If in doubt, push the vendor to allow the company to speak to customers with similar environments and, if the company has the resources, get the products on the floor and test them using industry standard tools and metrics.
Adam Day is product manager at SYSDBA.
As with the TCO, the same will hold true for metrics used in a ROI justification; vendors will put a heavy weighting on features and functionality, so try to set the weighting based on company needs.
For example, if thin provisioning or data deduplication are products the company uses to weigh the results in ROI calculations, review each claim and confirm the figures supplied are real and not marketing-based. It is common to see claims that the company will be able to recover 50X and more in terms of capacity with a deduplication method. These figures are often quoted for best-case scenarios, so do the research to see whether this information is relevant to the company's data and environment.
Otherwise, once the equipment is deployed in the data centre, the company may just find its proof points falling flat. Then it will end up going hat in hand to the management, which was convinced to invest in the new cost-saving technology, now having to admit to possible “miscalculations”, and that even more is needed to be spent to recoup the money.
With this in mind, be sure to validate all figures and claims when reviewing offerings based on ROI or TCO proof points. If in doubt, push the vendor to allow the company to speak to customers with similar environments and, if the company has the resources, get the products on the floor and test them using industry standard tools and metrics.
Nothing beats kicking the tyres and taking it for a test drive.
If help is needed determining what to test and review, feel free to mail me at adam.day@sysdba.com and I will send you some of the metrics we have compiled to help customers determine what is best to review for their project requirements.
* Adam Day is product manager at SYSDBA.
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