The Price of Storage

So I've been chatting it up with several people going through the buying process for storage, and one thing has become abundantly clear: There is no "right price" for storage any more.Small, agile companies have eaten the bottom out of this market. It does not matter if you prefer NAS over SAN, iSCSI to FC, FC over SATA or SAS over both. Price out a terabyte. Start with a company you don't know, try a search on Newegg.com for example, and then price all the way through to a tier one SAN.

You'll find a factor of 100 in pricing.

100. Think about that. How much service and support has to be present before that multiplier is worth it? Centralized management is nice, expandability is nice, but really, a factor of 100 is pretty extreme.

It has me wondering what the comparative margins are between these companies. I think I know. I'm guessing a factor of around 100.I suggest, just off-the-cuff, that you think hard about how and why you spend your dollars, they're a replacable resource, but pay raises go a lot farther toward productivity than brand names and slight speed improvements do.