Use Cases for Rough Pricing
Project Planning and Budgeting
It can be difficult to find pricing information for storage arrays, NAS devices, switches, servers, and Hyperconverged (HCI) appliances. Many manufactures rely on old style sales tactics of making their sales pitch before sharing and sense of pricing. That often puts customers in awkward situations when they find their $10,000 budget won't even put a dent in the $100,000 price tag of a solution. Storage Networks can help by providing quick budgetary pricing for different devices based on purchases we made for other clients over the past 6-12 months. Of course we are always happy to create custom proposals, but sometimes for projects 6+ months out, a simple point of reference that answers the question "is this a $10,000, $100,000, or $1,000,000 project" is all that is needed.
Alternative Solutions
Sometimes you have your heart set on a shiny new Dell-EMC VxRail, vSAN, or Nutanix Hyperconverged infrastructure. You get your quote back and experience sticker shock after the price you saw is 1.5x as much as someone on Reddit suggested. What do you do? You can obtain a quote from another manufacturer on similar hardware to make sure you are not getting taken advantage of. (Sometimes letting the first manufacturer know you are checking out other options will get you a better deal in and of itself, too.) Alternatively, Storage Networks might be able to assist by sharing a quote for other projects we have worked on with similar hardware specs to see if you have any room for negotiation.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Price Estimates
We generate dozens of quotes each year for Nutanix, Dell-EMC VxRail, HPE Simplivity, VMWare vSAN, StarWind, and other HCI vendors. If you have a general idea of the number of CPU cores your applications require, memory, and storage footprint, we should be able to help compare a few different options from these manufacturers. If you are not sure of your specs, we can can run a Dell LiveOptics or rvTools assessment to get you started.
HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco Server Price Estimates
Server price discounting is pretty consistent across manufactures. We generally know that a 50-60% discount off MSRP should be expected. We can quickly provide budgetary pricing for Dell, Lenovo, HPE, and Cisco rack mount servers (Proliant DL, PowerEdge R series, Cisco C series, Lenovo SR etc.) or blade options. Sometimes if you have been routinely buying from one manufacturer, you may not be taking advantage of competitive discounts such as HPE Competitive Edge pricing, or may not realize that different pricing programs by the same manufacturer can generate significant cost savings (such as HPE BTO vs CTO.) We can help review your pricing, or provide a competitive quote from another manufacturer.
HPE, Dell-EMC, Lenovo, Pure, SAN / NAS Price Estimates
As our name suggests, we well a lot of storage, both all-flash and hybrid models. We have extensive price references for HPE Nimble and MSA, Dell-EMC ME4, PowerStore, Unity, Lenovo DM / DE series, Pure Storage, as well as quotes for other manufactures like NetApp, Q-Nap, and Synology. SAN / NAS devices usually carry a lot of margin so pricing can vary wildly on the higher-end all-flash units. Just let us know your target capacity and rough idea of IOPS, and we can provide some placeholder pricing for your budget. If you are not sure how to size, we can run a rvTools or LiveOptics assessment.
Veeam, Unitrends, Nakivo, Rubrik, Dell-EMC Cohesity Price Estimates
We have tight partnerships with backup manufacturers that produce both software-defined solutions (Veeam, Nakivo) as well as all-in-one integrates solutions like Unitrends / Nakivo / Cohesity / Dell-EMC. We can provide rough license pricing and various storage hardware solution prices for a range of solutions as well as help calculate the cost of a cloud copy in AWS, Backblaze, Azure, or Wasabi.