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'Pay once' FalconStor storage model causes scratching of heads

You mean I had to pay twice or thrice to store stuff before?

FalconStor has announced something that seems … well, odd; a “Pay Once” pricing model.

The software-defined storage product supplier says it aims to disrupt global storage industry pricing practices which involve customers paying for the storage of their second, third, or more copies of data.

Well, er, yes, you store the data on a storage array’s media, either on-premises or in the cloud, and you have to pay for the media purchase or use. What’s wrong with that?

FalconStor says its “Pay Once” pricing model is now part of its capacity-based subscription pricing, and users need only pay for the primary copy of their data. How does that work?

FalconStor says: “Customers will no longer incur extra expense when migrating, backing up, and optimising data, further helping eliminate unpredictable capacity expansion costs often associated with traditional storage platforms.”

The company continued:

FalconStor will offer its software-defined storage platform with a single price; customers pay for only one license for all existing and future use of the product, including copies needed to migrate or to manage disaster recovery, backup or analytics. This pricing is offered irrespective of how much storage capacity the customer manages or any upgrades they make to their hardware infrastructure.

Its announcement has a canned quote from Sandor Orban, technical lead for infrastructure services at Sunrise Communications, the largest private telecommunication provider in Switzerland: “In the past, with the old-style storage systems we had, the problem was always with the software costs. At the end of a lifecycle, we had to pretty much dump licenses and rebuy them every time we had a refresh. With FalconStor we only pay for what we actually use, saving us a lot of money.”

That’s on-premises. Here’s a second canned quote for cloud use from Brian Meredith, managing director at cloud and managed hosting company Blue Chip: “To protect our customers, we always have three online copies of their data. This is only possible because with FalconStor, we only have to pay for the primary copy. There are no fees for the second, third or more copies.”

FalconStor CEO Gary Quinn also had a prepared quote: “By making clear to our customers that there will be no 2nd and 3rd copy costs and that we will only charge them for exactly what they are using in primary production data under management. We are not only saving them money, but also giving them the insight and clarity to plan for their future storage needs.”

Direct customers of FalconStore will still have to buy/lease/rent/whatever physical storage media capacity they need for second, third and any other copies of primary data, though; it’s only their FalconStor’s subscription software costs that are affected, and they could now be lower than competing capacity-based storage software pricing models. ®

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