Evaluating Power- and Cost-Efficiency Considerations in Enterprise Storage Infrastructure

This IDC Perspective provides a primer for enterprises to more effectively evaluate power and cost efficiency differences between different vendor offerings, identifying key metrics that will become important as IT organizations look to modernize to more efficient IT infrastructure. In light of developments just within the past six months, enterprises are changing their views on the importance of environmental, social, and governance issues in making storage infrastructure purchases. Given the complexity of factors that impact power- and cost-efficiency considerations, it can be difficult to understand how and why different storage architectures and product strategies perform on these metrics. The purpose of this document is to help IT managers making storage infrastructure purchase decisions better understand what to look for from storage vendors that reduces power consumption and the total cost of ownership of enterprise storage."It is not a matter of if but a matter of when power efficiency considerations are going to start having a major impact on storage infrastructure purchases for enterprises that maintain a large amount of on-premises IT equipment," said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. "To be able to recognize and choose the most power-efficient storage systems requires an understanding of considerations beyond what many enterprise storage vendors are willing to openly discuss today."