This article is designed to provide storage pricing guidelines. It is written for individuals involved in storage acquisition including storage managers, storage purchasing professionals, storage contracting professionals, storage planners, competitive analysts and others interested in storage pricing. The article is structured to provide guidelines across a range of storage technologies with commentary on current storage pricing and forecasts of future expectations.
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Pricing storage technologies
The following summarizes pricing guidelines from Fred Moore at Horison Information Strategies. Average pricing for varius storage technologies is estimated as follows:
- Solid-state disk - $1,500 - $5,000 per gigabyte - dependent on capacity and features
- Enterprise disk - $25 - $60 per gigabyte - includes controller, cache and drives
- Midrange disk - $15 - $35 per gigabyte - includes controller, cache and drives
- Optical disk - $15 - $30 per gigabyte - includes drives, media (23-30GB) and library
- Economy disk - $2.50 - $15 per gigabyte - includes controller, cache (optional) and drives
- Automated tape libraries - $.35 - $3 (non-mainframe); <$.20 enterprise - includes media and library using a 2:1 compression for total capacity
Forecasts
Historically, the cost per gigabyte of disk has declined approximately 25% - 30% per annum fueled by rapid capacity increases driven by Moore's Law.
Implications for negotiations
In storage, as with other rapidly advancing technologies, customers ideally purchase capacity only as needed in an effort to minimize book losses on assets that are rapidly declining in value. Practical considerations, however make this difficult as accommodating future capacity requirements with excess 'headroom' can minimize management complexity and expense as often storage management is more expensive than acquiring storage capacity.