A customer recently explained to me that our storage solutions were great, but were perceived as a “Rolls Royce solution,” and that they had to look at other options because they had some new budget pressures. As I met with the customer, it became clear to me that they were 
blurring the difference of price and cost. What they paid for the solution cost may have been higher than other options, but in actuality was a lower cost of ownership.
I often see that an HDS solution (controller-based virtualization, automation software) may have a higher price to purchase when compared to a low-cost simple disk architecture, but we are most often a lower cost to own compared to these cheaper-to-buy solutions. When it comes to budget cuts, most people are supremely interested in lower cost of operational-ownership.
This customer was recently interviewed in ComputerWorld about their architecture and the results of an economically superior storage solution.
The perception of high-price or high-end storage solutions often gets confused or overlooked in the context of lowest-cost-to-own. Such was the case with this Australian client, who did not fully appreciate the flexibility, rapid growth, low migration and ease-of management that the advanced HDS storage architecture brought to them. Some of the benefits they gained with HDS solutions included a very high utilization rate, virtually no migration cost and the ability to manage a lot of infrastructure will very little staff. The power, cooling and floor space requirements of HDS were small compared to products from other vendors with a similar capacity.
This is why econometrics is so important—the right architecture might not always be the lowest price, but it can very often be the lowest cost.
