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Cutting Software Development Time

High Availability and Fault Tolerance

FlashDisk OpenRAID disk arrays cost no more than other external RAID disk arrays and little more than inexpensive internal RAID disk arrays. External RAID disk arrays offer vastly superior reliability and high availability for software developers who are working in mission critical developments that cannot afford downtime. Hardware failures directly impact project schedules. FlashDisk external RAID arrays offer complete redundant fault tolerant "hot-swap" hardware including redundant fans, power supplies and controllers as well as RAID 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15 data protection with optional "hot-spare" disk drives. If any component fails, it can be replaced on-line without taking down the disk array or server - thus software development continues uninterrupted and the array is repaired completely transparent to software developers.

Return on Investment

Software development is a storage intense activity and storage is obviously needed in large quantities. FlashDisk OpenRAID ultra-high performance systems cost no more than typical external disk arrays offered by UNIX and NT server manufacturers and other reputable third-party providers of external RAID arrays. Running software development on FlashDisk is an easy to justify solution. There are three components to the justification.

(1) Productivity

For example, a project team with 10 developers saves a conservatively estimated 5% of their time by running every step of their project faster and running merges and builds at two to 2.5 times the speed by using FlashDisk OpenRAID. This 5% savings for each of 10 developers is the equivalent of 50% of one developer. At today's salaries, using $80,000 per developer, with corporate overhead, this is $40,000 annually in time savings.

(2) Revenue and Profit Enhancement

To the simple productivity calculation above must be added the market value of completing the project sooner. This varies by application but introducing a project or service a week or two earlier translates directly into tens of thousands of dollars per week for typical companies. For example, an e-commerce site expecting $25M per year in revenue and 10% profit of $2.5M has a weekly profit expectation of $50,000. If the project is completed just one week earlier, the one-week profit acceleration translates into a measurable and substantial $50,000 bottom line profit increase and substantial justification to speed development.

(3) High Availability

Software development projects are too important to trust to internal RAID arrays built into inexpensive NT servers or UNIX servers. The incremental cost of FlashDisk OpenRAID is minimal compared to the costs of shortchanging developers with inadequate platforms. Even if a FlashDisk were to be incrementally added, the entire cost would be repaid very quickly. The high availability of an external FlashDisk array will typically save three days of project downtime during a typical year. This is a savings of an estimated 30 developer days or 1.5 developer months. Again, as above, this translates into availability savings of about $10,000 in direct time savings without counting thousands in revenue losses avoided.

Total financial returns on a FlashDisk OpenRAID investment quickly add up and the results are shown in the chart below. In this example, the total financial return exceeds $100,000 per year. Investments in high performance FlashDisk OpenRAID storage systems range from 4 to 10 cents per megabyte of storage. A software project requiring 250 GB of storage, valued at a typical eight cents per megabyte, will invest $20,000. The project would receive all the benefits of high performance and high availability for just the price of obtaining the storage needed for the project anyway. Even if the total cost of the storage were considered incremental, the payback of $100,000 as outlined above on a typical $20,000 investment, would be a small fraction of a year; in this case the $20,000 investment on a $100,000 return is 20% of a year payback period or just 10 weeks.

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