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At the moment TCO calcuator cosinders the low-cost storage systems based on disk servers. It takes into account costs and parameters resulting from the server platform used, HDD and SSD drives applied as well as software defined storage software specifics (mainly Ceph).

HOW TO USE THE TCO CALCULATOR.

TCO calculator is provided as the excel sheet to be used offline.At some point we will perhaps prepare an online tool.

You can get it from here: LINK.

You should may  specify the basic system parameters on the single sever landing page. They include sever platform, type of the HDD and SSD disks used as well as the data redundancy level and access pattern planned in the system.

You may also analyse multi server configuratons using a dedicated tab.

Servers, HDD disks and SSD parameters can be added to the tab that included known server platforms, HDDs and SSDs. These lists should be extended so that they reflect all platforms and components known to the NRENs.

Computations related to power usage, capacity and performance are based on several parameters and assumptions, collected in the parameters tab.

The remaining tabs include the computations of the system capacity, performance, CAPEX and OPEX cost etc.

PLANS

Hardware aspects and parameters are simulated based on the catalogue values mainly. The parameters and assumptions made need to be verified by real life experience and measurements.

While hardware related part is more or less covered, efforts will be put into including the storage software specifics in the simulations.

Models for simulating the power usage, MB/s and IOPS performance are relatively simplistic. We should perhaps work on improving these models based on the existing heuristics supported by real life relatonships and values collected by NRENs.

It is also planned to consider traditional disk array- and tape-based systems in addition to low-cost disk server platforms.

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