Impact of Vendor Selection on the Total Cost of Ownership of Intra-Data Centre Networks
Ronald Romero-Reyes, Vishwanath Vijayakumar Pai, Shabnam Sultana, Thomas Bauschert · 2019
In this paper we study the impact of vendor selection on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of intra-data centre networks. Besides the unit costs of network components, vendors differ in key technical factors that have direct influence on the network TCO. We quantify this influence by evaluating the TCO of selected network architectures when four vendor solutions are considered, namely, Juniper, Cisco, HPE and Brocade. The results show that the vendor solutions mainly differ in the equipment energy consumption and in the ability to upgrade the network capacity as the server port speeds increase. In particular, a sensitivity analysis shows that the changes in the power consumption caused by the traffic load have an impact on the TCO that strongly depends on the vendor selection.