Compellent Offers Tool To Calculate Storage TCO

Compellent Technologies on Monday unveiled a tool to help customers calculate the total cost of ownership of their storage beyond the cost of acquiring more capacity.

The new Compellent TCO Tool, which is available to solution providers at no charge, analyzes the cost to own both Compellent and non-Compellent storage products, said Michael Beach, vice president of sales operations for the Eden Prairie, Minn.-based vendor.

"It helps customers justify the cost by tying in information like the number of servers, what connections they use, how many applications they're running, what databases they use, how many locations, their growth rate, what percent of data is active vs. inactive, and the yearly salary of storage administrators," Beach said.

Compellent produces software to automate tiered storage, with such capabilities as thin provisioning, storage virtualization, snapshots, and remote replication.

The Compellent TCO Tool uses this information to help solution providers analyze their customers' storage costs over the long-term, Beach said. "And it's dynamic, so you can go in and change assumptions to look at the affect," he said.

John Dusek, president and owner of Convergent Storage Solutions, an Apple Valley, Minn.-based solution provider and Compellent partner, said tools like the TCO Tool help customers justify their investment in a vendor's storage infrastructure.

"A lot of people want to see if they invest in 5 Tbytes of raw storage, what the cost of using it is," Dusek said.

Storage decisions are usually based on capacity, and not on the cost to manage and deploy it, said Lynn Herbert, an account executive with Covergent. "Tools like the TCO Tool help customers quantify the securing and managing of storage, and not just the acquisition."

Compellent is offering the TCO Tool free-of-charge to solution providers, Beach said. "It's just part of our making our channel partners' lives easier," he said.

The company is also offering an on-line "light" version of the TCO Tool for customers who what to try it themselves, he said.