5May 06
Storage licensing doesn't add up
Posted by Steven Deare @ 17:48 1 comments
A fledgling user group claims plenty of storage vendors are unfairly using per terabyte pricing/licensing models for storage software, despite the explosion in data levels.Naveen Sharma, Griffith University's associate director of information services, recently started the first Storage Networking User Group (SNUG) in Brisbane.
Sharma says the SNUG is a user-driven effort to fast forward promises by the Storage Networking Industry Association on interoperability and a fairer storage marketplace.
One of his bugbears is vendors licensing storage software by the terabyte. Sharma argues that as storage levels skyrocket (for instance, CSIRO recently signed a deal for three petabytes), vendors are milking the per terabyte model for all it's worth. The problem, he says, is that disk storage has become increasingly cheaper to produce. Yet vendors are not passing on these savings, he says.
Do you agree with Sharma? Have you fallen victim to the per terabyte model?
If you're a vendor, let's hear your response.
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Sharpeware are a specialist independent storage software house and we find that selling per server (for example) penalises those with a distributed environment and favours those with more modern consolidated SANs/NAS -- which is surely the wrong way round?
I think in principle a storage-based model is the fairest - but I agree that some of the bigger players tend to abuse this leading to potentially very large hidden costs for storage management software.
My solution - try the independents (but then I'd say that, wouldn't I!)