A New Look at Storage Pricing

Forget capacity-based pricing, one-off, sliding scale discounts, etc. There's another way to look at storage pricing. Call it the butcher block approach.

This take is based on a very real metric -- total equipment weight. This metric is not only a fair gauge of prospective raised-floor pressure, it's also a key to helping C-series management understand what it is you want them to buy.

Take, for instance, Sun's new midrange tape library, the StorageTek SL3000. While it's billed by Sun as a "little brother" to the mammoth SL8500, it's nowhere near little, weighing in at 2,935 pounds. At $68,000, that's $23 per pound.

"Listen, boss, I know that's a lot of money, but you get a TON of equipment for that!"

Let's try a few more butcher-block storage pricing examples, snatched from recent headlines:

What's that you say? It's not scientific? We're not comparing apples to apples? We're not even getting the right model numbers matched with the right weights?

Well, all great marketing math had a humble beginning, right? Sometimes it starts on a cocktail serviette. No worries. Someday we'll see an array hit $5 per pound.

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