I’d second both of these points, but especially the pricing one. When we looked at it, pricing was based on the volume of data pre-deduplication, and bought in blocks of n Gigabytes or Terabytes.
I had two big issues with that
1) From a business point of view the one of the big value point of dedupe is to reduce the storage/transfer costs of backup. But their pricing model means that rather than spending that money on infrastructure (local tape, faster links, whatever), we pay that money to veritas/symantec. OK, fine, it’s probably less money over all, but even so to me it means that Symantec is getting the lions share of that value from the software, not me. I actually think this will change somewhat as dedupe becomes commodity.
2) Volume based pricing often stings you 2 or 3 years in. Sure, right now paying $n to backup x TB might seem cost reasonable, but the midrange/highend vendors never seem to drop their $n per x ratio at the same rate as the rest of the industry – so in two years time, you may find yourself justifying quite high cost per gig upgrade, just because you added 3 remote sites, and suddenly have to buy another data block. And you no longer have the bargaining position of being a new customer. Which leads me back to my first point – why am I buying another data block when 50-80% of that data is going to be de-dupped from other sites anyway?
Had their pricing been the same per tb, but based on the de-duped data size, not the pre-de-duple, we probably would have signed up.
Regards,
T.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 2:57 AM, Michael Graff Andersen <mian71 AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
We are considering Puredisk for our remote offices and would like to hear other users experiences with it
PureDisk is great for backups but you have to have a serious look at your restore requirements. For example, if you have a double-disk failure in a RAID5 set at a local office and lose a large raidset, you could be restoring by shipping disk drives rather than a network-based restore.
For a restore of a word processing document or spreadsheet, PureDisk is fantastic. If you anticipate restores of a user's 10GB PST file, this could become painful.
That said, we really like PureDisk technically. We still don't like the price...
.../Ed
Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE
ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
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