In an era of explosive data growth and flat or diminishing budgets, organizations must evaluate potential technology purchases not only on their technical merits but on their economic merits as well. Virtualization, tiered storage and Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software can all deliver significant economic benefits to the organization by helping to increase storage utilization and overall efficiency while reducing costs and complexity. By addressing capital expenses as well as operational expenses, these three elements together represent an economically superior solution-a comprehensive and sustainable approach to storage-both today and for the future.

This paper examines CAPEX and OPEX as they contribute to TCO in order to provide the most comprehensive analysis of the economic impact of tiered storage and virtualization strategies.