In his recent blog, “Democratizing Enterprise Storage Pricing,” Chris Evans stated “that in his opinion, customers want friendly, honest storage pricing.” We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why we created our TRUprice storage pricing tool. It ends price haggling and allows our customers to see the benefits of storage efficiency in terms of dollars.
Friendly, Honest Pricing or Lead Magnet?
In his blog, “StorONE challenges storage array makers to stop hiding prices,” Chris Mellor also liked our TRUprice storage pricing model. He compared it to a couple of other vendors that are offering to show their pricing if you fill out an extensive form or register for an account with the vendor. That’s not friendly, that’s annoying.
Our TRUprice storage pricing tool does not require registration, and we don’t need to know your blood type. You can go to TRUprice, configure a storage system to meet your needs, and contact your reseller to order it. If you want to talk to us or if you want a formal quote, click the appropriate button, no pressure. That’s friendly, honest storage pricing.
Answering the Architect’s Questions
Chris Evans also asks a few fundamental questions in his post, and we need to answer them. The first is how expandable are the various configurations we present. We’ll address expandability in the next revision of the tool. Still, for now, a simple answer is the standard configurations (non-HA) are not as expandable as the highly-available (HA) configurations.
Our HA configurations can expand from the minimum capacity presented in TRUprice to the maximum. The HA configuration uses the same server and S1 Software for each capacity tier mentioned. The only items needed to expand are potentially another JBOD/JBOF for more drives. You may also need to upgrade to our software’s capacity license. This range of expandability, using the same server, while maintaining high performance, is once again a tribute to the efficiency of our software. Our efficiency is the key to friendly, honest storage pricing
Honest Storage Pricing AND Performance
Chris Evan’s second question is, what is the expected performance of the system? Again, this is a feature we will present in the next version of TRUprice. The systems, generally, will deliver about 85% of the raw performance of the drives installed in the system. Lower capacity all-flash systems will provide a hundred thousand IOPS or more. The higher capacity all-flash systems will push close to one million IOPS. Hybrid systems will deliver similar performance, assuming the access is from the flash tier. Our hybrid configurations provide an above-average flash tier capacity. A generous flash tier capacity means the majority of accesses to data should be high-performing. Part of honest storage pricing is to make sure your hybrid system works better than expected.
Software only configurations, of course, depend on the hardware the customer is providing. Generally speaking, if our software is running on a midrange, dual-processor – eight-core server, with 128GB of RAM, we should deliver about 85% of the performance of the drives installed in the system. My colleague, Ittai Doron’s blog “The ROI of Storage Efficiency,” discusses the importance of maximum drive performance.
Questions From Customers
It is essential to realize that the solutions’ performance is roughly the same no matter which server hardware you select. In our recent webinar, “The TRUth About Storage Performance and Efficiency,” Gal Naor, StorONE CEO answers these and other customer questions.
Some customers were concerned that our strategy might backfire. For example, what happens if our competitors publish their pricing and beat our price points? The goal of TRUprice is to highlight the value of efficient storage software and to provide friendly, honest storage pricing. Because of the efficiency of StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform, we can deliver extremely high performance from midrange servers, with modest RAM requirements. We also derive maximum performance from SAS architectures. We support NVMe but don’t need it to meet most customers’ performance expectations.
As a result, we don’t think anyone will be able to meet our price points. A competing vendor would have to re-write their software from the ground up. A software re-write is at least a five-year undertaking.
Questions From Competitors
Our competitors also asked a lot of questions, more like statements, about TRUprice. One statement was, “well, these aren’t enterprise systems.” Really? We build solutions using servers from leading manufacturers; they all have next business day onsite maintenance and software support. An upgrade to same-day support is available. Our S1 software includes all the features IT professionals want, like advanced protection from media failure, snapshots, replication, and tiering.
Another “question” was, why don’t we list our competitors’ pricing? Really? Have you tried to get pricing from other storage vendors? It is one of the reasons we created TRUprice. We’ve delivered friendly, honest pricing to the market. We think it is the responsibility of the other storage vendors to publish their pricing is a similar fashion.
Next Steps
Set up a personalized demo
Chat with us about your storage needs
Download our whitepaper to learn how efficient storage software can also reduce backup infrastructure costs- Download our whitepaper on the value of Maximum Drive Performance
Watch the below webinar with StorONE CEO Gal Naor and CMO George Crump as they discuss how we leverage our efficient storage software to develop TRUprice.
