What Is Total Cost of Ownership

What Is TCO?

TCO stands for Total Cost of Ownership. In terms of data storage, it’s an assessment of all the costs your organization incurs while procuring, installing, running, and maintaining your IT infrastructure. TCO may include hardware and software, management and labor, storage capacity and compute resources, and any opportunity costs incurred during downtime.

Why Perform a TCO Analysis?

A TCO analysis is usually performed before making a major capital purchase such as a new server, storage area network (SAN), or network-attached storage (NAS) device. If the value added from a new asset outweighs its TCO for a given time span or life cycle, you can acquire the asset with confidence in the economics of your purchasing decision.

How to Calculate the TCO of Your Data Storage

Calculating the TCO of your IT infrastructure requires a systems-wide understanding of the costs you’re likely to incur throughout the life cycle of owning that IT asset. Use this four-step process to perform your own TCO analysis:

1. Describe the acquisition. What are you trying to purchase?
2. Define the life cycle or time span for your analysis.
3. Identify costs associated with ownership.
4. Model your costs over the desired time span you plan to have the new asset.

With a cost model in hand, you’ll be able to see your capital and operating costs and determine how long it would take before you can expect to make a return on your investment.

TCO Calculators

Performing a TCO analysis from scratch can be a lot of work, so IT vendors often provide their own TCO calculators to help you make comparisons when you shop. For example, Pure Storage® provides a handy TCO calculator you can use to see how much you can save by running AWS on Pure’s Cloud Block Store™ as compared to Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS).

Calculators like these can give you the numbers you need to put into more detailed cost projections. You’ll want to do your due diligence and have an analyst construct a more comprehensive TCO model when making purchasing decisions for your data center.

How Pure as-a-Service Can Help You Reduce the TCO of Your Data Storage

Efficiency is one of the best ways to reduce the TCO of any data center. A streamlined, user-friendly storage management system can eliminate hours of administrative labor costs. Costs can be reduced even further if ongoing maintenance and upgrades of your storage arrays are similarly effortless to implement. 

Pure as-a-Service™ brings the operational agility of the cloud on-premises with a single subscription to innovation. Pure as-a-Service offers:

• Block, file, and object storage with cloud-like agility on-premises
• The opportunity to switch from CAPEX to OPEX* all-flash storage as a service for I/O intensive applications—you get the physical arrays but only pay for the storage you use
• Self-driving storage with AI-powered predictive analytics and a user-friendly UI with Purity and Pure1®
• Automated data protection via high-availability clustering, disaster recovery, and ransomware-proof snapshots

With Pure as-a-Service, you get a Modern Data Experience™ that consolidates both your on-premises and multicloud storage environments into a single data storage resource.

*OPEX treatment is subject to customer’s auditor review.