Archive Operating Cost - Primary Site
40TB over 10 Years
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
700,000
800,000
Plasmon
AA638
NetApp
NearStore
R200
EMC
Centera
(Parity)
EMC
Centera
(Mirrored)
New York
Tokyo
London
Figure 6 Archive Operating Cost in US for Primary Archive Sites
Primary Site
New York
Tokyo
London
Plasmon AA638
19,391
27,147
29,732
NetApp NearStore R200
97,623
136,672
149,689
EMC Centera (Parity)
271,933
380,707
416,934
EMC Centera (Mirrored)
461,855
646,597
708,178
Figure 7 Archive Operating Cost in US for Primary Archive Sites Data Summary
The Plasmon AA638 is significantly less expensive to operate than the NetApp or EMC
alternatives, irrespective of location. In the most expensive city, the AA638 costs 29,732 to
operate for 10 years, contrasted with a Centera mirrored configuration that would generate an
electricity bill of 708,178. This represents a near 24-fold increase in operating cost between
the Plasmon and EMC configurations.
It is also interesting to note that the NetApp configuration is substantially less expensive than
the EMC system even though they are both based on SATA disk drive technology. This can
be accounted for through two significant design differences. The Centera configuration
provides higher redundancy, requiring more drives to meet the 40TB capacity target and is
also comprised of four-drive nodes, each with their own processor. This design draws much
more power than the simpler NetApp RAID architecture. While the NetApp solution provides
more useable capacity per drive, it is implemented with a standard RAID architecture that
may not provide the same level of resilience as the Centera configuration. These system
level redundancy issues are not a consideration for the UDO Archive Appliance since it is
based on non-volatile UDO storage media.
Vendor Product
Cost Ratio
Primary Site
Plasmon AA638
1.00
NetApp NearStore R200
5.03
EMC Centera (Parity)
14.02
EMC Centera (Mirrored)
23.82
Figure 8 Primary Site Cost Ratio Summary
While the NetApp system is less expensive to operate than the EMC alternative, it remains
more than 5 times more expensive than the Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance. The Plasmon
solution is much less power hungry since it employs only a small amount of spinning
magnetic disk as a high performance cache and uses a very power efficient library when
archiving data on removable UDO media. The power consumption numbers for the UDO
Archive Appliance assume a worst-case scenario with the disk drives, library and UDO drives
in full operation. In practice this will seldom be the case, the UDO drives and library sit idle
when not being used, saving additional power. By contrast, the NetApp and EMC systems
consume massive amounts of power spinning and cooling magnetic disks even when there
are no users accessing the archive.
Green Archival Storage v1.7
Page 7 of 13
Plasmon, 25 Jan 07
