Backups
TCO calculations for backups are another hotly contested item. I have seen this one done a few different ways, but I chose to take the complexity out of this model. In this case, TCO is the number of tapes purchased in a year, the cost of each tape, the depreciation expense of the capital infrastructure (servers and libraries), and the annual cost of offsite tape storage and recall services. Measuring backup TCO can get unwieldy when the discussion leads to matters of tape retention, which can be from one year to seven years to forever. Keep in mind, the purpose of this tool is to take a snapshot of costs for one year only.