CIOs and CTOs of enterprises not only pay attention to business support and technological evolution, but also pay attention to an eternal topic: IT cost optimization and income-output ratio. It Key Metrics Data 2021 Infrastructure Measures — Storage Analysis We recently read an interesting report on this topic at Gartner and can’t wait to share IT with you.
As businesses and organizations make the digital transition, IT cost management will become increasingly important. This Gartner report takes a global user survey in 2020 and includes average numbers in terms of storage cost efficiency and productivity benchmarks for storage support personnel. These survey results can be used as a part of the CIO, CTO to consider cost management basis. The distribution of data volume managed by the surveyed enterprises is shown in the figure below:
Source: Gartner (2020).
The storage architectures used by these customers span different storage hierarchies (including DAS, network storage, near-line and offline storage). The metrics studied include an average of cost efficiency and operational productivity measured in terabytes of bare storage capacity.
Annual cost per terabyte of bare storage capacity
This metric reveals the relative cost level of the customer’s overall storage environment. In the specific business scenarios, SLA, storage utilization, the overall storage scheme used within the enterprise and the overall storage management strategy at the same time, the cost level is very different, CIO, CTO should be based on their actual requirements for reference.
Source: Gartner (2020).
It can be seen that in the investigated enterprises, the annual storage cost per TB of most enterprises is $416-1048, with an average of $652. The smaller the environment scale, the higher the average cost ($1141 for <3PB, $671 for 3-10PB, and $484 for >10PB).
The average company spends on a full-time engineer responsible for storage
According to the survey, the average cost of a full-time engineer responsible for storage is $125 /TB, which varies by location, experience, and expertise. Most enterprises spend $111- $168 per TBB to store full-time engineers. The larger the size of the managed data, the higher the average cost per TB to store engineers, averaging $117 for <3TB environments, $121 for 3-10PB, and $134 for >10PB.
Source: Gartner (2020).
Storage Full Time Engineer Outsourced Proportion
The ratio of in-company personnel responsible for storage to outsourced engineers is 92:8. Many enterprises report that they can maintain IT flexibility and agility through outsourcing. However, if the enterprise has not formed a good knowledge base, intellectual property rights and process management, the long-term use of outsourcing will increase the cost, which well explains the low proportion of storage outsourcing engineers in the enterprise.
Source: Gartner (2020).
Each full-time storage engineer manages the amount of bare capacity
Understanding the average efficiency of storage engineers in managing data volumes is important for building an efficient data management team of “the right size”. The management efficiency of storage engineers is closely related to the complexity of storage architecture and the support of storage products and services.
Source: Gartner (2020).
conclusion
From this report, it can be seen that within the enterprise, the labor cost of storage management is still very high. By improving the data scale managed by storage engineers, the labor input of data management team can be effectively reduced. At this time, storage software and storage system play a key role. ** In the actual customer using YRCloudFile, through our products and comprehensive service support, the customer’s single storage engineer managed more than 30PB of data, which has played a significant role in reducing the customer’s overall data management costs. 六四运动
It is hoped that the interpretation of this report will help CIOs and CTOs better understand the industry’s input and cost distribution in data storage, so as to effectively improve the input and output of storage architecture.