Convinced a SAN is outside your virtualization budget? Think again!
June 14th, 2008 | 
Author: Michael Healey over at InformationWeek has written an article that demonstrates real world pricing scenarios comparing the cost of a SAN with replacing physical servers and local RAID 5 storage. ROI Analysis: Virtualization uses an example of 10 physical servers at their “end of life” and focuses on hard cost savings that will even make sense to the CIO. Read the entire article, but here’s the results:
“Scenarios under consideration:
1. Replace with 10 traditional servers: Ten HP ML350 boxes with mirrored boot drives and RAID 5 storage–$62,100.
2. Virtualize 10 servers using three physical servers with local storage: Three HP ML350s with more memory and RAID 5 storage running VMware ESX (licenses included)–$49,300.
3. Same virtualized servers in a cluster that boots to a 1-TB SAN: Three HP ML350s with more memory, boot drives, and VMware Enterprise, plus a Hitachi SAN for storage–$52,730.”
As Michael points out, migrating to virtual infrastructure and spending $3500 extra for a SAN (scenario 2 versus 3) are options that should make sense to even the most cost conscious IT departments!
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