NetApp will jack up disk prices next month
Deadly Thai flood ripple effect continues
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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. ®
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

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