Today we’re announcing an entirely new pricing model, and I am excited to share how this revolutionary pricing model came to be.
Thanks to incredible technological advancements in storage hardware, it’s no longer a challenge to find a storage solution with the level of performance and capacity you need. The real challenge is enabling organizations to benefit from these advancements within the confines of a flat or shrinking IT budget while not decreasing data resilience. New threats, like ransomware, require increasing data resiliency. You should be able to use the drives that deliver the best $ per IOPS and drives with the best $ per TB without being penalized for scaling your storage systems.
Only StorONE, the storage company that rewrote the IO stack, has the technology to enable this new pricing model. Other storage companies with capacity-based licensing strategies are inhibiting the adoption. With StorONE, the customer pays according to the number of drives used rather than the total capacity of the storage system. If the customer replaces 20 TB drives with 40 TB drives, there is no additional cost. We add ownership certainty to the hardware and call this pricing innovation our Scale-for-Free pricing model.
Here’s why:
- Over the past decade, storage hardware has grown from a density of 2TB per drive to 20-30TBs per drive. The price of hardware per TB has dropped by 80%. So, why don’t you see 80% lower prices? Because storage vendors continue to charge you according to capacity (per terabyte) license instead of recognizing that should decrease storage costs when you use newer hardware. Their software licensing is eating up all the savings benefits that you should realize from the hardware innovation.
StorONE has solved this problem, so customers can finally benefit from these significant price reductions!
- Most storage companies cannot use high-density drives because their software is old, and it takes days, even weeks, for HDDs to rebuild in the event of malfunctioning drives. This long rebuild time endangers the entire storage system. Thus these vendors recommend using many, more expensive per TB, low-density drives to compensate for their software inefficiency. Ask your vendors why they are using 8TB or 12TB hard disk drives when 18TB and 20TB drives are readily available.
With the StorONE Storage Engine, you can now, for the first time, rebuild a volume made up of 20TB HDDs in just a few hours on a typical storage system. By being the only company that solved the rebuild problem, you can now use fewer, high-density drives—minimizing your hardware, minimizing power, and maximizing your savings.
- The same inefficiency applies to the AFA (All Flash Array) vendors that currently cannot utilize more than 10-20% of the per-drive performance of flash SSDs. Their software is too limited and inefficient to get the full manufacturer’s stated performance out of the hardware. So, they require many more drives than you should need to achieve high performance, which greatly increases your costs. Ask your storage vendors why they need so many flash drives to deliver performance when the performance of any single drive is 100K IOPS or more? Also, ask them why they don’t talk about IOPS anymore? Are they hiding something?
The StorONE Storage Engine extracts 95% of the per-drive performance, so you don’t need a system that is overprovisioned with a bunch of drives and is overly expensive. You can now achieve the performance you need with six drives! Other vendors would need dozens of drives and still may not be able to deliver the same performance. It is another example of our cost savings and why we are the only company that can price storage this way.
- Other vendors offer storage systems that they claim will last for 7-10 years. Within seven years, the industry expects drives of 100 TBs or more to be available. But users will suffer even more pricing pressure from their software capacity-based vendors. Why would you keep the existing drives for 7-10 years when you can simply swap them out for the newest hardware with several times that density and performance, and immediately bring your costs down? Why shouldn’t you enjoy these cost advantages going forward?
StorONE’s Scale-for-Free pricing program enables the organization’s cost of storage to decrease steadily as new innovative drives with higher capacity and performance come to market. The environmental (floor space, air conditioning, and management) cost reduction of using 75% fewer drives is enormous!
- Most importantly, storage is software, and software should be priced according to elements in the server. For example, virtual systems like VMware are not priced by the number of virtual machines, and database environments are not priced by the number of rows, but rather by the types of processors.
The StorONE model is similar, priced by the component that most affects storage: the number of drives. Since our software is so efficient, we are the only vendor to price our software according to the number of active drives in the system. What VMware did for computing, we are doing for storage with our virtual storage containers for all resources.
Every storage vendor claims to be a “software company” now. If this is true, why do they charge customers as if they are still hardware companies? Additionally, why do some vendors need very specific high-end, or even custom, hardware to achieve less than what StorONE can achieve?
During our live webinar “Do MORE Storage with LESS Hardware,” join StorONE’s Chief Product Strategist, George Crump, and me to learn more about our drive-based pricing model and why our software is uniquely positioned to deliver it. Get all your questions answered during our Q&A round.
Today, we are putting an end to capacity-based pricing—and announcing the beginning of something great for your storage infrastructure and budget by enabling your storage pricing to decrease over time.
With StorONE, you can now scale for free. Using our new, groundbreaking pricing model, you only pay per the number of drives used—not density or capacity. If you replace three 20 TB drives with three 40 TB drives, there is no additional cost, and your storage capacity cost drops in half. We add price certainty to your hardware and the freedom to take advantage of ongoing innovation.
Only StorONE, the storage company that rewrote the IO stack, has the enabling technology to deploy this new pricing model. Other storage vendors will continue demanding that you pay much more than necessary and take away all the benefits of the newest hardware innovations, making more money for them and providing fewer benefits for you.
With StorONE, you can achieve your storage goals with the minimum amount of hardware possible and the industry’s only fair pricing model for users.
Use the highest-end drives with the best hardware pricing and save on costs of using them without compromising quality. You can now future-proof your storage and grow as needed without spending more.
I am so pleased that we are bringing this capability to market when all organizations are looking to save on IT expenses. At StorONE, we “THINK RESULTS.” This is a significant new program with a significant result, don’t you think?
