Finance asks for a three-year TCO comparison between refreshing an…

Question

Finance asks for a three-year TCO comparison between refreshing an aging on-premises SAN for records storage versus rehosting the same workloads to EC2 with EBS (and related AWS storage). Which evaluation best supports the migrate-versus-stay decision?

Accepted Answer

Build a TCO model that includes hardware refresh, facilities, labor, and risk for the SAN path versus compute, storage, data-transfer, and operations cost for the EC2/EBS rehost path across three budget years. — TCO isn’t sticker price on a controller versus one EC2 size—it’s three years of iron, power, people, and risk versus cloud run-rate. Put both paths on the same spreadsheet before the budget hearing.

Answer

Compare only the list price of one SAN controller to one m5.large instance and ignore facilities and labor.

Answer

Assume AWS storage is always free for government accounts and skip quantitative TCO.

Answer

Use only the prior year’s electricity bill as the complete TCO for both options.

Finance asks for a three-year TCO comparison between refreshing an aging on-premises SAN for records storage versus rehosting the same workloads to EC2 with EBS (and related AWS storage). Which evaluation best supports the migrate-versus-stay decision?

Short Explanation

Full Explanation