By Calvin Zito

As I mentioned in my post titled Storage virtualization and the new EVA, the StorageWorks EVA is proving itself to be far easier to manage than competitive traditional disk arrays.  Let me give you some of the back story here.

Last year, we commissioned an analyst team (The Edison Group) to measure the steps, clicks, and time it took to perform the most common array administrative tasks on several midrange arrays.  They wrote a paper about those findings called "TCO White Paper: EMC, NetApp, and HP Midrange Storage Arrays".  To be blunt, the paper never really measured TCO and in the end I thought it was the wrong title but it was still a good thing to see the time savings that we get with the EVA versus other arrays.  

As I discussed in my post titled "Must See TV: EVA, EMC, and NetApp Go Head to Head" we brought customers to Houston to run some testing for us.  You can find the video in the Must See TV post but there was also a white paper titled "Competitive Testing of Common Administrative Tasks" that gave more details on what happened through that testing.  Again, interesting but still didn't give me what I wanted to see - how much can a customer save. 

Fast forward to pulling together our announcement for the new EVA6400 and EVA8400.  The thought was to do a survey of storage administrators on how they spend their day - meaning how often do they perform these different administrative tasks on their storage arrays.  It seemed to me that if we had that data, we could then get to a time or cost savings when managing an EVA.  This approach hit paydirt!  Because the Edison Group had done the original testing, we turned to them again to survey administrators and calculate the savings.  The paper based on this research is called "Comparative Management Cost Survey"  Let me briefing summarize the results:

The total workday savings of an organization using an EVA as compared to EMC is 36 percent. When compared to NetApp, the savings are 50 percent.  Workday savings is a term Edison uses to describe the value of an employee's daily work averaged over a year. 

So when you hear us say the EVA costs up to 50% less to manage than other competitive traditional disk arrays, you know now why we can confidently say that.  If you aren't using EVA's today, can you really afford to spend 2X managing the other guys' arrays, especially in today's economy?

One last point - I'm sure the competition will try to come up with 30 different reasons why our conclusions are wrong.  EMC already tried to debunk the original Edison report by having an EMC engineer perform the same tasks on a Clariion and time the results they got.  Well, duh!  If I have an EVA engineer do the same tasks that Edison did I'm sure they'd complete them faster too.  I would love to put all of these products to a joint test - have the best and brighest engineers from each company perform these tasks on their own storage array and everyone posts the results to their website.  Somehow I don't get the sense that this is a challenge that either EMC or NetApp will want to touch.

Have a great weekend!