NetApp will jack up disk prices next month
Deadly Thai flood ripple effect continues
Posted in Management, 6th January 2012 10:31 GMT
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NetApp is raising disk drive prices as a result of the Thai flooding.
Here is NetApp's statement:
NetApp empathizes with the people of Thailand as they work to recover from the tragic flooding. We work closely with our hard disk drive suppliers to stay abreast of their recovery efforts and to secure supply to meet our needs. However, similar to other vendors we have seen a negative impact to our drive costs.While we initially absorbed the cost increases to protect our partners and customers, we are no longer able to do so. Effective February 6, 2012, we will be temporarily increasing HDD list prices 5 -15 per cent over current pricing. We will continue to monitor the situation as it evolves and will provide updates as appropriate. Thank you for your continued partnership.
The rises start on 6 February, and follow on from related disk-price rises by EMC and HP and the slashing of hard drive warranties by Seagate and Western Digital. ®
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COMMENTS
The part the would worry me
is the slashing of warranties. If the product is not good enough to keep its warranty, it shouldn't be considered good enough to sell. Period.
checked your dedupe ratios for unstructured files yet?
Dedup is good for backup for less frequently accessed files. Dedupe on pre-compressed content such as a JPEG file results in 0% space gain. The process of decompression-deduping blocks-recompressing and writing again is just too cumbersome. So when you turn on your dedup on Netapp (or any other vendor), you see scarse results for frequently accessed unstructured files like Office, PDF, image data, etc. - but that is the stuff that grows more than anything else.
Netapp is after profit, so I hope it is clear, they would not give it away for free if it saved you 50% or more on storage space. They give it to you "for free" because they know even when you turn it on, you still need more storage in the future, your data still grows. So in order for you not to look around for solutions that really help you with your data growth, they give you this "patch" for free.
WTF
A 15% increase. Nice. I just got quoted US$15K for a dozen in a shelf 2tb ea. Nets like 8tb. So our margin on cgs goes up 2 points. We jack up prices 15. Nice
My thoughts?
Nice advertising, however Netapp arrays have Dedup built in. Why would I buy your software when I can check a box and have the array do it? For free.
Time to think about storage utilization
If companies don't start thinking about storage utilization now, they will still buy the 15% more expensive disks because they have no other chance. SDD's won't be a real alternative as fast as companies would like them to be. And when storage companies incl. NetApp realize that HDD demand is rather inelastic to a 15% price increase, they won't start a raise to the bottom again and keep up prices as long as possible.
With advanced data reduction technologies such as our Native Format Optimization, you can store 2-5 times more files on your existing disks and become more storage efficient. You need less HDDs and you are less exposed to these price increases.
So why not starting to improve your storage utilization now, get really "green" and effectively reduce your data?
Imagine you had an old car which consumes 20 litres per 100 km and you can get an add-on which lets you drive 200 km for 20 litres. Wouldn't you like to get this now instead of waiting for the electric car in 5 years (when electricity will probably cost as much as gas now) ?
Thoughts?
Chris Schmid, COO balesio AG
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