The main stream computer magazines are asking the same questions we have raised in this blog.

The NetApp StoreVault offering is the same beast. Sure, you can get a 1 TB unit that does snapshots for under $5K, but looking closely, you see that adding RAID and a hot spare to the baseline box leaves you with something less than 250 GB of capacity. In my opinion, and that of others, the box has limited capacity, limited auditability, limited manageability, limited support and apparently no investment protection. Is this really what SMB/SME’s want?

But as you know even enterprise sized accounts are looking at costs today. A couple of days ago a NetApp customer sent us a quote they had received from their vendor for some DS14 storage shelves with 144 GB drives. The quote was for over $29,000.00 for 2 TB of Storage! That is a mighty big markup, even for a company from SillyCon Valley! The quote was for 7 shelves and came out over $200,000.00 . The customer asked what we would charge and it turned out to be less than 50% of the price, a lot less.

Enjoy your weekend.