NVMe-ver-Fabrics array supplier Pavilion Data has a new business model; buy the array and controller and lease drive slots.
Customer choose the level of controller performance they want and subscribe to a number of drive slots, populating the bays with whatever drives they want. It’s a BYOM – Bring Your Own Media – model called OPENCHOICE Storage.
OPENCHOICE Storage has an all-inclusive, cloud-like subscription model that bundles maintenance, support and software into a single price that will not change for the life of the array. Customers can license more slots as needed
The premise is that customers can buy SSDs on the open market at a lower cost than buying them from array suppliers. Pavilion expects the $/GB to be half of what an all-flash array vendor might charge.
Pavilion says CPU, memory and SSD manufacturers are constantly innovating, but the three-year refresh cycles of traditional storage OEMs prevent customers from taking advantage of these innovations. Its OPENCHOICE Storage enables IT to buy, scale and repurpose media on its own timelines.
Pavilion’s Head of Products, Jeff Sosa, told us; “OPENChoice was initially wanted to offer to some of the large hyperscale-type accounts, since they already buy SSDs for their servers with DAS. Since we use the same kind of SSDs in our platform, it made sense to allow them to continue buying SSDs the same way. In addition, it offers customers a lot of flexibility to change and mix/match media to fit specific application needs in real-time, even within the same chassis by using different tiers of flash in the same box.
“Other customers have been interested in repurposing resources when projects come and go, so this allows them to remove devices they no longer need in the array and repurpose them elsewhere, and replace them with something else in our array. Therefore, flexibility and cost savings are the key business drivers behind it.”
CEO Gurpreet Singh says this eliminates capacity-based pricing: “With a 50 percent lower cost of acquisition than all flash arrays and three times better utilization than DAS, OPENCHOICE makes storage infinitely simpler to procure and manage.”
The company has qualified drives from the major drive manufacturers and says it qualifies new drives on a regular basis. B&F
