Tiered Storage: How to Calculate Your Potential Margins

For cloud or managed hosting providers, storage is obviously a key underpinning technology for any cloud or hosting infrastructure. What's not so obvious, however, is how to productize the storage subsystem in a way that aligns with your ideal business model. And it's not always clear how your customers want to consume it from you, how your ops teams want to support it, and how your CEO wants to report the sales to your board.

We have learned over the past five years that there are many ways to address most of these business challenges, but the discussion about storage tiering never seems to go away.

The good news is that with the quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities at the core of all NetApp® SolidFire® storage architectures, we can develop models that simulate pretty much any type of tiering. The Fueled by NetApp consulting team is available to help you develop the right deployment scenario to support your margin requirements and your customer consumption demands-and to do it predictably and consistently.

Our experienced consultants ideate with you to plan the right tiering model for your business strategies, including, but not limited to:

• Fixed performance and variable capacity
• IOPS/GB performance tiering (simulating legacy storage arrays)
• Avoidance of tiers completely by simply charging for IOPS and gigabytes independently
• An a la carte offering for which you can sell performance and capacity resources independently, as your customer wants

To get you thinking about the many deployment options, we created a very simple but representative sample storage tiering calculator.

Learn how to build your cloud hosting infrastructure and start monetizing storage today. To get into a deeper discussion about storage tiering, margins, and service differentiation, contact the Fueled by NetApp service provider consulting team. Our industry experts will walk you through what we see other service providers in the industry do with storage tiering, and they will help guide you on your go-to-market journey.