StorONE CEO Gal Naor today challenged storage array vendors to reveal their prices in public. “Buying an enterprise storage system shouldn’t be as hard as buying a car, but should be as easy as buying a smartphone,” he said.
The software-defined storage startup has built an online configurator with openly available pricing for its TRU (Total Resource Utilisation) S1 software, engineering it for efficiency and speed. The software supports block (Fibre, iSCSI), file (NFS, SMB) and object (S3) use cases and runs on industry standard servers from Dell, HPE and Supermicro.
“S1:TRU price simplifies the storage procurement process,” Naor said. “No more back and forth haggling over solution costs. No more wondering if you would have gotten a better deal at the end of the quarter. S1:TRUprice allows enterprises to get the best pricing, upfront, while also getting the best performance and data resiliency features they need.”
StorONE licenses S1 software in either 1, 3 or 5-year subscriptions. When a user selects a system and confirms purchase, StorONE ships the whole system to the customer for contactless, remote installation and training. And it thinks it has a big price advantage over its rivals.
George Crump, StorONE’s chief marketing officer, said customers “can come to our site, price out their exact solution and compare it to what they are paying now. In most cases, we are confident they will find that the 3-year TCO on our solution will be less than what they are paying for one year of maintenance with their current vendor.”
Interested people can trek over to the StorONE website’s pricing section where they can use a three-year TCO pricing configurator without registering their details, and with instant prices as they configure a system’s server, availability, media, capacity and networking cards.
We tried it out. A 736TB high-availability all flash HPE-based system had a $346,318.14 3-year TCO. Changing to a Supermicro server moved the price to $341,860.78. A 1PB standard (not HA) all-disk Supermicro server system would cost $138,36.00. It’s fun playing around with the options and easier to use than the Nimbus Data ExaFlash One pricing configurator, which we also tried out this week.
Will Dell EMC, HPE, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, NetApp and Pure Storage publish their prices? We all know the answer to that.
