Stan,
We're in the same boat. We try to buy media for at least 6 months at a
time or more when we don't necessarily know what will happen to data
growth.
To try to work around this, I've been doing is tracking growth over the
last few years. This has shown that, despite the odd jumps, our growth
rate is pretty steady. This has been EXTREMELY useful to budget for
media, to begin to make the case that our environment needs updating,
etc.
Good luck.
Teresa
-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Stan Horwitz
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 5:08 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Budgeting for tape media
On Jan 14, 2008, at 4:38 PM, Preston de Guise wrote:
> Hi Stan,
>
>> We are trying to grapple with the problem of budgeting to purchase
>> more tape media. I am wondering how other organizations handle this
>> problem. Is anyone aware of any software and/or methodology that
>> would
>> help us decide how much money to allocate for tape media purchases
>> over a given period of time? Thanks.
>
> The biggest problem with budgeting for tape media is that the prices
> vary
> over time. For instance, I had a customer once insist that we quote
> for the
> 3 years media in advance based on current prices, which came to a
> ridiculously high price since they were intending an LTO-2 solution
> when
> LTO-2 was brand new.
>
> I've gone with the strategy of pricing the next 3 months worth of
> media at
> current prices, then pricing the next 3 months worth of media at 10%
> less,
> then the following 6 months media at 10% less again, and it usually
> comes
> out a little better.
>
> (While it's not something that's easy to convince accounting types
> on, tapes
> should not be budgeted for under "capital investment" but rather,
> "operational expenditure".)
>
> Due to fluctuations in market prices, budgeting an absolute fixed
> amount
> over more than 3-6 months, particularly for new media, is
> problematic at
> best.
My problem is that management is steadfast against spending another
dime on tape media without me providing a plan on how much we will
need for one year out, however, I am not privy to any information
about the servers I back up. I never know when someone will add a few
hundred GB worth of data to a server or bring in a new server until
the day it happens. I am quite frankly at a loss as to how to meet
this requirement.
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