Price Lists

Egenera joins the elite group of storage vendors with their very own price list page on StorageMojo.

I’m not as familiar with Egenera as I’d like to be, but given that Cisco is trying to steal their thunder maybe they’ve got something after all.

The StorageMojo take
The current perfect storm of infrastructure change – clouds, SSDs, economy, virtual everything – is forcing even the most conservative IT organizations to look at how to do things faster, better, cheaper. This is when incumbents adapt or die and when newcomers can become incumbents.

Wishing Egenera the best of luck.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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And not a moment too soon.
The hard working elves in StorageMojo’s global HQ had a serious throughput problem. The flu? Too much holiday cheer? No one knows and the elves, as usual, aren’t saying much.

But that’s all behind us now. The newly updated price lists are up except for one. Price List engineering assures me that it will be up Real Soon Now. We’ll see.

The StorageMojo take
Better late than never.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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Self-service pricing is coming
A reader wrote in the other morning to say:

I wanted to take a moment to thank Robin for this invaluable tool. As an architect I often use this site to get Rough Order of Magnitude costs for components and set these up in spreadsheets that allow others to apply thier vendor discounts to get my ROM costs closer to their actuals. The site lets me rough out a Vendor A solution and a Vendor B solution and quickly get to comparative pricing without waiting for negotiations around pricing.

You are very welcome.

But now there is something better
An approval-based system that gives you up-to-date pricing. Go to pricing pages for 3par, CommVault, DataDomain, Lefthand, VMWare or EqualLogic and click on the reseller ad.

That will take you to their site where you can request a quote. This isn’t an anonymous system – you have to provide personal information – and the reseller has to approve sending you the quote.

Normally that should be a quick process. I tried it once and got a response in 5 minutes. The service is available from a company named Echoquote.

The StorageMojo take
Marketing, and many sales people, like to keep a tight hold on pricing for reasons that may have once made sense but don’t today. As we saw with the latest “Dear Uncle StorageMojo” a qualified buyer limited his research because pricing and feature opaqueness made it too difficult to compare many vendors.

That is just wrong if you’re the company losing the business. And since smaller companies are the ones losing most of the business, they’re the ones who should be easiest to deal with.

At DEC I used to hand out our thick price lists – marked “Company Confidential” – to all the regular customers. With a $20,000 per working day budget I didn’t have time to quote every cable and network interface. My value was product knowledge – not pricing.

And not to worry, I will still update the StorageMojo price lists every 6 months or so.

Comments welcome, of course. Who is the easiest storage company you’ve dealt with?

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Who the heck is Adva?
A couple of months ago a commenter asked for pricing info on Adva. I’d never heard of them, but as part of some web site work I checked into them.

Turns out they are a fast-growing German-based company specializing in metro-are optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) of Ethernet. WDM runs multiple optical channels over a single fiber using lasers of different colors. A single fiber can carry many high-speed links.

If you are interested in a disaster-tolerant metro area replication using iSCSI and/or NAS you should check them out. And with their price list online you can get budget numbers without the hassle of calling a salesman.

Sepaton is an enterprise de-dup company
I spoke to Sepaton CTO Micky Sandorfiat SNW. BTW, Sepaton is “no tapes” backwards.

Other work
I’m gradually closing comments to older posts in an effort to discourage comment spam. I also moved the consulting content to my TechnoQWAN LLC web site.

What other price lists would you like to see?
No promises, but that is how I learned about Adva.

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I’ve updated the price lists for these companies.

• ADIC
• Avamar
• Brocade
• Documentum
• EMC
• EqualLogic
• Falconstor
• Finisar
• Hitachi
• HP
• IBM
• Isilon
• Lefthand
• McData
• NetApp
• Nexsan
• Omneon
• Oracle
• Pillar
• Riverbed
• RSA
• Sun
• Texas Memory Systems
• VMware

Many are called but few(er) are chosen
I’ve decided to drop Dell and Seagate from the list because up-to-the-minute pricing is available on the web.

I’m also dropping Quantum, and this is probably the last ADIC list. Lots of companies OEM their stuff, so you can look on other lists to get pricing, or check the web for the lower-end kit.

I didn’t get around to some of the smaller companies, either. But I may yet. If you see a big hole in the list please comment or email.

I know some competitive analysts use the price lists. If you are one of them I’d appreciate a Paypal donation as a token of your appreciation. I’m considering cutting back on pricing info since it it is a lot of work. If you have any suggestions about how to improve the usefulness of the lists please comment or email me.

If you’d like your company’s price list to be on the page with your competitors feel free to send me one.

StorageMojo will soon return to its regularly scheduled programming.
Update: I asked a question about the RSS feed and several folks answered. Thanks! I don’t know a thing about RSS feeds but I’ll see if there is anything I can do to improve it.

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There’s been a fair amount of interest in the VMware and Documentum price lists, so I thought I’d go a little further afield and offer an Oracle price list.

Maybe an Oracle customer could explain how to configure their products. Seems complicated.

Enjoy.

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