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Storage Pricing Guidelines
Since its inception, the storage industry has used the price per megabyte and then price per gigabyte as the primary measure of capital expense (Capex) or acquisition expense for disk and tape storage. The Capex figures shown are raw hardware ASPs (Average Selling Prices) for working subsystems only and does not include storage management software, personnel, facility costs, energy or maintenance costs are used as these are optional and vary widely negating any apples-to-apples comparisons. Working disk subsystems include cache, controller and drives for disk subsystems and a robotic library, drives and media with a 2-to-1 compression ratio to determine capacity for tape libraries. Deals and discounting vary by size of the deal, vendor, customer account level, preferential status, and potential future sales opportunity. Average selling prices are used in all cases.
In the late 1990s, after a decade of disk price erosion exceeding 30 percent annually and relatively few technological enhancements to tape technology, the perception about disk pricing falling below tape pricing became more widespread. In the late 1990s, tape technology began to accelerate its development curve. Historically, multiple tape cartridges or reels had been required to back up the entire capacity of a disk drive. Beginning in 2002, a single tape cartridge could contain multiple copies of the largest disk. Automated tape remains the lowest-price storage for midrange and enterprise storage systems based on Capex, and technology roadmaps indicate that this is expected to remain so for the next eight to 10 years. The new flash memory disk prices are currently falling faster than any other storage products. However, flash memory pricing should be based on $/IOPs rather $/GB. Always use a capacity pricing metric for capacity devices and a performance to price performance devices.
Source: Horison Information Strategies: Storage Spectrum
© 2009 Horison
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