We all know the pitch, consolidate your storage, virtualise your servers and share the infrastructure where possible  through use of a blade based solution for the best possible TCO.  Why would anyone do anything else? We are all agreed. OK lets look at some prices to back up our cost busting claims. I have used list prices throughout. Discounts will vary according to customer, vendor and the time of year.

Example 1

Customer has been buying HP-UX servers and storage for one application and IBM AIX servers and storage for another application that often sit together in the same rack. Would it make sense for both systems to use the same storage? Of course it will. OK what's is the price? The HP storage being used is an MSA60 SAS attached with 9 disks....

..the IBM server was to use the DS5020 with 10 disks. OK lets add 9 disks to the DS5020, to do this we need an expansion tray, a licence kit for the use with HP-UX. Looking at list prices..

remove from the HP order the MSA60 and the P800 RAID card = - £6500
Add 2 Fibre cards, HP-UX attach licence and EXP520 with 9 disks = +£21,000

Consolidated option = £14,500 more expensive.

Looking at the EVA4400 as an alternative to the DS5020, the additional drawer, disks and fibre cards would cost an additional £ 11,800

Consolidated version £5,300 more expensive.

So OK perhaps if we could easily double the size of disks to  300/400GB disks and consolidate the both workloads onto a single RAID set. But what are they Gaining? is it worth the risk of performance reduction? hmmmm

Example 2

Customer wants to buy 12 low spec INTEL servers, 3 of which need to be SAN attached.

Mr customer, I'm confident a blade based solution will give you better value. Lets price it up....

Blades

HP blades HP BL460c G6 E5502 6G 1P Svr

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5502 (Dual core 1.86 GHz, 4MB L3 Cache, 80W, DDR3-800)

C7000 blade chassis with cheapest network and SAN switches

total list price = £80,200

Rack mounts

and the cheapest rack mount alternative....

HP DL160 G6 E5504 Hot Plug EU Svr

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5504 (4 core 2.00 GHz, 4MB L3 Cache, 80W, DDR3-800)

total list price £22,800

Er... for a fair comparison we should add on price of FC/Eth switch ports and additional cabling costs. (I'm struggling here to make them sum to more than than £57,400 to make up the difference)

Summary

Do the additional benefits associated with consolidation make up the gap in price in these two examples? I doubt it. There seems to be many examples out there where shopping around pays greater dividends than clever architecture design.

I find it really frustrating as I my instincts says single storage subsystem and blades are a tidier solution, but if price is the most important factor (which it so often is)  its difficult to argue with the numbers. Are the vendors just pricing things wrong? I guess if it was easy I'd be out of a job.

I had another example the other day where a customer decided that a VMware solution was to expensive and was opting for a physical server option. I'll see if I can do a follow up blog on this.