CIOview PowerStore

TCO Primer

When doing a detailed TCO assessment within a particular product line it is essential to use the same basic assumptions concerning key system related items. CIOview uses the following system related settings whenever possible to complete a TCO comparison, namely:

• Utilization rate of 85%
• Compression/Dedupe of 3:1
• A 7.68TB drive (NVMe when possible, or comparative drive from a performance perspective)
• DRAID 5 or 6
• A parity setting of 8+1P
• Annual storage growth of 25%
• The storage capacity is purchased over time
• Minimum software
• Vault/spare drives based on vendor's best practices
• Idle power down set at 40%
• Minimum cache/DRAM/NVRAM
• Minimum CPU's
• One pair of adapters
• And a 4-year base maintenance agreement.

In the case of PowerStore our preferred default DRAID 6 is not available so instead we selected DRAID 5. Using 250TB of initial usable storage as the basis of our analysis one can see the TCO/TCA results for each of the PowerStore products below:

	TCO	TCA	TCA% of TCO
500T	$1,311,823	$453,716	34.5%
1200T	$1,265,307	$474,458	37.4%
3200T	$1,331,664	$534,686	40.1%
5200T	$1,456,523	$645,919	44.3%
9200T	$1,577,375	$816,671	51.7%

TCO for 250TB of Initial Usable Capacity

As one would expect, the TCO and TCA generally increases as you move up the PowerStore product line. The only exception to this trend is the 500T which is almost exactly the same TCO as the 3200T. Over-all, the TCO progression up the PowerStore product line is surprisingly small. Meanwhile in terms of TCA you can see the percentage increases continually from a low of 34.5% to a high of 51.7%. As a result, discounts naturally become more impactful as you move up the product line further suggesting that TCO plays a crucial role in selecting the optimal PowerStore model.

What may also be surprising is by changing one of the more than fifty TCO variables just how much this will alter the results? For example, in the case of the 9200T simply selecting one drive over another will increase your TCO by more than $786,000, or 34%.

Generally speaking, one can expect the TCO of a data storage solution to decrease as the capacity of the drive selected increases. All things being equal, one can also generally expect the performance of a drive to improve as the drive capacity decreases. As a result, it becomes a question of how much are you willing to tradeoff in the form of a higher TCO, for a greater level of drive performance. Having a sophisticated TCO model that allows different drives to be selected and the underlying factors such as RAID and parity to be changed, highlights just how much the total economics and performance of today's storage is subject to careful array design.

Drive Capacity	TCO
1.92 TB	$2,318,032
3.84 TB	$1,693,813
7.68 TB	$1,577,375
15.36 TB	$1,531,929

9200T 250TB of usable capacity

In this case the 15.36TB NVMe drive option has the lowest TCO, but the write performance of this drive is going to be approximately .25Gb/s for most workloads. Having a small number of SCM drives would up this performance substantially, but then the TCO would be higher than a 7.68TB drive implementation which is going to offer potentially 4x the write performance of the 15.36TB drive option.

Buying Capacity

Determining the optimal drive or optimal drive combination is one of the key ways for customers to strongly influence their TCO. Another way to do this is to look at the TCO implications of purchasing storage upfront as compared to the economics of buying it over time. Now there are benefits of upfront purchasing in the form of:

• The security of not running out of capacity.
• Being better able to absorb seasonal storage demands.
• Negating the time and effort to get annual storage purchases approved by corporate.
• Reducing the time and effort associated with capacity planning.
• Vendor incentives.

However, before extolling the virtues of purchasing capacity upfront, it is worthwhile in most cases, to know just how much this convenience may cost in TCO terms.

Purchase Strategy	TCO
Purchase Upfront	$1,807,301
Purchase Over Time	$1,577,375

Using the example of the 7.68TB drive, the cost for the convenience of a one-time storage purchase is almost $230,000. Now some manufacturers will charge a premium for capacity purchased after the initial array is acquired in the hopes that you will buy all of your capacity upfront and be locked in for the life of the array. As a result, the real cost of buying upfront maybe less than $230,000, but on the other- hand hardware prices are declining every year.

PowerStore Competitors

PowerStore competitors will naturally depend on whether you elect to consider the PowerStore T or the X product lines. At the 250TB of initial usable storage level the following products can be considered competitive to PowerStore in general, although they do not all have PowerStore's lofty ambitions to rationalize traditional workloads with new data analysis initiatives.

• IBM's 7200 and even perhaps their model 9200.
• NetApp's AFF-A400. While it does not have NVMe drives to offer, it does have an excellent set of SSD options and high performance network connectivity.
• Hitachi Vantara E590 or the E790. While there is a 24 NVMe drive limitation there is a rich set of SSD options. Like PowerStore there is also a 3 rd generation PCle limitation.
• Infidat Infinibox offers a customer a well-regarded option with an interesting growth model. CIOview has no TCO data on this vendor.
• HPE Nimble AF 40 or AF 60 offerings both have limited network connection options and additional capacity has to be purchased in increments of twenty four drives making for a very lumpy TCO result.

PowerStore-A Technical Viewpoint

As previously mentioned, Dell/EMC's PowerStore is available in two configurations-PowerStore T and PowerStore X. Having said that, a more nuanced view of the world recognizes that there are in fact three quite different platforms. PowerStore 1000, 3000, 5000, 7000, and 9000 models use the two-node, dualsocket Intel® Xeon® platform while the 500 model is based on the two-node single-socket Intel® Xeon® platform. PowerStore 1200, 3200, 5200, and 9200 models get the two-node dual-socket upgraded Intel® Xeon® platform. In all three cases, PowerStore uses both nodes to serve host I/O and run data operations in an active/active manner.

From a performance perspective there is the choice of just NVMe flash storage or the addition of Intel Optane storage class memory (SCM). This option is complimented by front-end NVMe connectivity with NVMe over Fibre Channel and NVMe over TCP.

Pro's

The one key distinguishing feature of PowerStore in our opinion is AppsON. AppsON is the basis for integration of PowerStore's container-based design with VMware ESXi. This allows PowerStore to offer a local, on-array application environment which integrates with VMware vSphere's management capabilities. For storage professionals, this means that applications are closer to storage because they can now run as virtual machines on PowerStore directly. AppsON also offers an application deployment environment that provides seamless movement between PowerStore appliances and VMware ESXi servers. Finally, AppsON provides the option to bypass hypervisor resulting in bare-metal NVMe performance while providing support for plug-and-play functionality and PCIe fault containment. Note: AppsON is not available for the 500T model.

If you have a separation between object and file, and have a true desire to manage two or more worlds of data differently, then PowerStore is not for you. PowerStore is all about or certainly a very large part of PowerStore is its ability to run VM's directly on the storage appliance. Doing this means you have the benefit of using PowerStore Manager and vSphere to insulate you from the complexities of managing a diverse set of data. In addition, by keeping infrastructure applications closer to the data, the complexity and time-lag of management can be greatly reduced. The Power in PowerStore really comes from the derived simplicity of management and its optimization approach.

Con's

Arguably the whole issue of scaling across this product line is somewhat confusing. T models can scale out to 8 controllers while X models are limited to a single node pair. At the same time expansion units can only be added if all 21 slots in the base unit are full. Plus, if SCM Optane devices are used, then expansions cannot be!

Other issues that some customers have raised include the NAS portion of PowerStore not being up to par. There is no native synchronous replication and so VPLEX is the only option.

*** To see CIOview's standard set of TCA and TCO assumptions, click here.