How does the cost of a hyper-converged system compare to SAN or NAS?

T-Blog Editor/ September 1, 2020/ Best practices for data center operations, Cloud pricing and cost optimization, Data Center Hardware, Engage the experts, IT infrastructure management and planning

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When evaluating the cost of a hyper-converged storage system, it’s important to keep the functionality of the system in mind in addition to cost per gigabyte.

By Brien Posey

It isn’t entirely fair to compare the expense of a SAN or NAS system to that of a hyper-converged system because the three technologies were created for different purposes. In addition, there is no fixed price associated with any of the three. Costs depend on a number of factors, such as the amount of storage purchased and the scale of the deployment. There are also low- and high-end offerings for each technology. NAS systems, for example, are generally considered to be the least expensive of the three, but a high-end NAS system could cost as much as a low-end hyper-converged system.

Another thing to consider is that you are paying primarily for storage when you purchase a SAN or NAS system. Sure, there are other components such as networking hardware that must be purchased, but the bulk of the cost is directly attributed to storage hardware. 

Hyper-converged systems comprise a number of different components, including compute, storage and networking. The compute components account for a significant portion of the overall cost. If you base your estimate solely on storage, you would find hyper-converged storage systems almost always have a higher cost per gigabyte simply because they contain more than just storage hardware.

A final consideration is functionality.

In the case of SAN, NAS or even a converged storage system, the storage hardware can be used for any purpose. In the case of a hyper-converged system, all the components work together and cannot be used separately. A hyper-converged system would therefore be a good choice to build a virtualization infrastructure, but not to expand available data storage.

Brien Posey asks:

How important is cost when determining which type of storage you will use in your environment?

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