Time for a little ranting & raving today.
There's something in our industry that legitimately bothers me. There are various pricing strategies and structures for the different network server players out there. I personally like ours but there's validity to many different pricing strategies.
What kills me, absolutely kills me, is the pricing for expanding a system. Vendors get you into a system and then to expand that system is where we start to see pricing that is absolutely unreasonable and it's because now, the vendor has the leverage.
THAT'S NOT OKAY!
What I'm talking about is expansion enclosures. So when you look at the pricing for expansion enclosures, the going rate for 192TB expansion is about $30,000!
That is not that much cost for vendors! There's no reason that once you buy into a manufacturer and install their system that you should have to pay that much for more storage. That's over double what it should cost!
SIDE NOTE - Our 192TB expansion is $12,795, build that and other configurations here.
You can go to Google or Amazon and look up these drives, there's nothing special about them.
I remember 15-20 years ago when we had flashing hard drives, lining up their firmware, putting the jumpers on the right part of the drive and making sure every drive was the exact same model so you weren't hosed!
Back then that took a lot of work to make sure everything worked properly and manufacturers had to hold a lot of inventory and it's just not like that anymore.
These days manufacturers are ordering drives as they need them. As far as the type of drive, as long as its a 12G SAS Enterprise class drive. Once you're in that realm they all work pretty well and it's not a lot of work to set them up.
So there's my rant for the day. I just don't understand why vendors are charging $30,000 for an expansion and that's infuriating.