StorONE recently announced S1:TRUprice. I had the opportunity to talk about the announcement with George Crump, and thought I’d share some of my notes here.
What Is It?
A website that anyone can access that provides a transparent view of StorONE’s pricing. There are three things you’ll want to know when doing a sample configuration:
- Capacity
- Use case (All-Flash, Hybrid, or All-HDD); and
- Preferred server hardware (Dell EMC, HPE, Supermicro)
There’s also an option to do a software-only configuration if you’d rather roll your own. In the following example, I’ve configured HPE hardware in a highly available fashion with 92TB of capacity. This costs US $97243.14. Simple as that. Once you’re happy with the configuration, you can have a formal quote sent to you, or choose to get on a call with someone.
Thoughts and Further Reading
Astute readers will notice that there’s a StorONE banner on my website, and the company has provided funds that help me pay the costs of running my blog. This announcement is newsworthy regardless of my relationship with StorONE though. If you’ve ever been an enterprise storage customer, you’ll know that getting pricing is frequently a complicated endeavour. there’s rarely a page hosted on the vendor’s website that provides the total cost of whatever array / capacity you’re looking to consume. Instead, there’ll be an exercise involving a pre-sales engineer, possibly some sizing and analysis, and a bunch of data is put into a spreadsheet. This then magically determines the appropriate bit of gear. This specification is sent to a pricing team, some discounts to the recommended retail price are usually applied, and it’s sent to you to consider. If it’s a deal that’s competitive, there might be some more discount. If it’s the end of quarter and the sales person is “motivated”, you might find it’s a good time to buy. There are a whole slew of reasons why the price is never the price. But the problem with this is you can never know the price without talking to someone working for the vendor. Want to budget for some new capacity? Or another site deployment? Talk to the vendor. This makes a lot of sense for the vendor. It gives the sales team insight into what’s happening in the account. There’s “engagement” and “partnership”. Which is all well and good, but does withholding pricing need to be the cost of this engagement?
The Cloud Made Me Do It
The public availability of cloud pricing is changing the conversation when it comes to traditional enterprise storage consumption. Not just in terms of pricing transparency, but also equipment availability, customer enablement, and time to value. Years ago we were all beholden to our storage vendor of choice to deliver storage to us under the terms of the vendor, and when the vendor was able to do it. Nowadays, even enterprise consumers can go and grab the cloud storage they want or need with only a small modicum of fuss. This has changed the behaviours of the traditional storage vendors in a way that I don’t think was foreseen. Sure, cloud still isn’t the answer to every solution, and if you’re selling big tin into big banks, you might have a bit of runway before you need show your customers too much of what’s happening behind the curtain. But this move by StorONE demonstrates that there’s a demand for pricing transparency in the market, and customers are looking to vendors to show some innovation when it comes to the fairly boring business of enterprise storage. I’m very curious to see what other vendors decide to follow suit.
We won’t automatically see the end of some of the practices surrounding enterprise storage pricing, but initiatives like this certainly put some pressure back on the vendors to justify the price per GB they’re slinging gear for. It’s a bit easier to keep prices elevated when your customers have to do a lot of work to go to a competitor and find out what it charges for a similar solution. There are reasons for everything (including high prices), and I’m not suggesting that the major storage vendors have been colluding on price by any means. But something like S1:TRUprice is another nail in the coffin of the old way of doing things, and I’m happy about that. For another perspective on this news, check out Chris M. Evans’ article here.