Free. Gratis. Given away.
It is not an uncommon thing to meet potential and existing customers wondering about our pricing policy on storage. I have compiled a list of the most common questions an made an attempt to answer them:
- Why do you charge for storage, i can get 2GB on Gmail for free!!!
No you can't. Gmail and other services offers you mail and storage functionality in exchange for being allow to target you with very efficient text advertisement based on the content of your e-mails (This has made Google a very, very profitable company). There's no advertising within it's learning, and i very much doubt our customers would like to see that change!
Also many of these 'free' services do not provide you with an SLA. Our company guarantee an availability of 99,7%,overnight backup to two physically separate locations and we'll keep the backup for three years after you delete the file.
- I can buy a 300 GB hard drive online for less than 1000 NOK, which is only a fraction of what we have to pay you for storage!
Comparing a hard drive for your private computer to enterprise storage is like comparing a bike to a Rolls Royce with a private driver, free petrol, a mechanic and another Rolls Royce driving behind you just in case the first one breaks down. Your hard drive will ultimately fail you and if you don't have performed a backup yourself you'll loose...everything. When a hard drive in our storage unit is about to fail, a technician in Ireland calls us to tell that he has deactivated it and enabled a spare disk - over the internet. A new disk is automatically dispatched and no data is lost, not even for a second.
- But even if your hardware is much more expensive than low-end hardware, the number doesn't really add up. You must be making a fortune off this!!!
Remember that it is not hardware we're providing you with. It's a storage service. In addition to the physical storage unit (and all the redundancy that comes with it) the storage service includes electricity, personnel costs, backup, training of personnel, network connection, management of the service and even support (the more your users use our platform, the more support you will be needing from us). There are also other overhead costs such as selling and invoicing you for the service...
- We have a big storage unit locally at our it-department. Can we use it for storing stuff that goes inside it's learning?
Yes and no. It is not difficult to link external content into it's learning and make it work together fairly seamlessly. But it is not possible to store content under the same application context externally. It would make it really difficult for us to guarantee availability and response times (not even mentioning backup) if a large part of our solution was dependent on hardware and network resources outside our control. And at the end of the day, the total cost for a customer to build a high performing enterprise storage solution would probably be much more than actually buying storage from us.
- Storage is increasing rapidly, will the cost of storage with it's learning decrease at the same speed?
Over the last few years our standard storage price has dropped significantly. I am sure that this is a trend that will continue as hardware costs go down and economy of scale kicks inn. However, actual storage has exploded so there is no question that the total storage cost has increased. But is that really that strange? Over the last few years there has been a massive growth in the computer-to-pupil/student ratio. This has increased the need of investment in many areas, storage being just one of them.
