Calculating the Cost of Operations
To illustrate how these time savings can affect a service provider's bottom line, we have calculated the operational cost savings for a service provider that chooses vSAN over a traditional array-based storage solution. These calculations take account of tasks that must be repeated many times throughout a typical four-year period, considered to be a normal hardware and software refresh lifecycle. These calculations have assumed the tasks will be completed by a senior storage administrator, and we have calculated costs based on that individual’s salary, plus benefits.
The average national base salary for a senior storage administrator was found to be $88,599, and total compensation estimated to be $126,662, based on information gathered from salary.com. In this example, the total compensation includes base salary, employer contributions for bonuses, social security, 401k and 401b, disability, healthcare, pension, and paid vacation time. We calculated the average cost per minute for a senior storage administrator’s time at $1.02, based on 52 40-hour weeks.
We then estimated the number of times the storage administrator would need to carry out these tasks per four-year period, for each of the three scenarios, based on industry experience, to come up with reasonable estimates of maintenance events, storage additions, deployments, and so on. In
Table 3, we present the assumptions we used to calculate the number of tasks for the cost comparisons.
Table 3. Estimated Operational Costs (3 Scenarios)
Scenario / Activities | Total Events Per Year / FC SAN & vSAN | Cost Per Event / FC SAN | Total Cost Per Year / FC SAN | Cost Per Event / vSAN | Total Cost Per Year / vSAN |
Scenario 1: Initial Platform Deployment | 2 | $244.80 | $489.60 | $12.24 | $24.48 |
Scenario 2: Modifying Service Levels / Workload Configuration | 104 | $122.40 | $12,729.60 | $3.57 | $371.28 |
Scenario 3: Increasing Capacity and Scaling | 12 | $91.80 | $1,101.60 | $2.04 | $24.48 |
Table 3: Estimated operational cost savings based on these scenarios when using vSAN versus a medium-sized traditional array-based storage system with 1000 VMs.
In the following table, we have calculated the two-year, three-year, and four-year total cost of management operations, as the sum of the platform’s operational cost, of the three scenarios we evaluated for the hypothetical 1000-VM data center.
Table 4. Comparison of Total Cost of Three Scenarios Over Various Life Expectancies
| Array-Based Solution in $ | vSAN Solution
in $ | vSAN Management Operational Saving in $ |
2-year CapEx (from 3 evaluated scenarios) | $28,641.60 | $840.48 | $27,801.12 |
3-year operating expenses (from 3 evaluated scenarios) | $42,962.40 | $1,260.72 | $41,701.68 |
4-year operating expenses (from 3 evaluated scenarios) | $57,283.20 | $ 1,680.96 | $55,602.24 |
As shown in
Table 4, the results show that when compared to a traditional shared storage array, the VMware vSAN platform provides a significantly lower operational management cost, which in turn can result in a lower TCO for the VMware solution, when considering the three scenarios we have outlined.
These three scenarios demonstrate only a small subset of the typical storage operational requirements of a service provider, but other studies of cross-industry IT spending show that annual operational expenses are typically between two and four times capital expenses. This means the impact of operational cost savings for vSAN might be multiplied well beyond the totals for the three tasks we have included in this analysis. As a result, VMware Cloud Providers might find that additional features of vSAN, such as iSCSI block storage or tight integration with VMware vRealize Operations™ and VMware vRealize Log Insight™, could lead to even greater management operational savings.