AIMS AND SCOPE

NRENs and other academic organisations are currently using, building or planning to build the low-cost storage infrastructure. Aim of this work is to help the system designers  in understanding the real costs of the storage systems.

TCO calculator enables analysing the storage infrastructure costs including the hardware investments costs as well as operational costs such as energy, maintenance and data center related costs. It also calculates and simulates overal system parameters such as system throughput, IOPS etc.

At the moment TCO calcuator cosinders the low-cost storage systems based on disk servers. It takes into account costs and parameters resulting from the server platform used, HDD and SSD drives applied as well as software defined storage software specifics (mainly Ceph).

HOW TO USE THE TCO CALCULATOR.

TCO calculator is provided as the excel sheet to be used offline. You should specify the basic system parameters on the single sever landing page.

They include sever platform, type of the HDD and SSD disks used

PLANS

Hardware aspects and parameters are simulated based on the catalogue values mainly. The parameters and assumptions made need to be verified by real life experience and measurements.

While hardware related part is more or less covered, efforts will be put into including the storage software specifics in the simulations.

It is also planned to consider traditional disk array- and tape-based systems in addition to low-cost disk server platforms.