It’s time to buy some more disks for the SAN we have at work. The SAN is made by Compellent and we’ve had it for a year and it’s been great. One of the selling points was the ability to add disks however we wanted – one at a time is possible, which apparently isn’t the case with other SAN products. The one we looked at from LeftHand expanded by purchasing entire nodes, so the incremental cost was pretty high. Compellent seemed to have a higher initial cost but cheaper incrementally.
Well, that wasn’t really the case, as I’ve come to discover. The way they license features on the SAN requires “expansion licenses” for each set of 8 disks you add on. As it happens, I would like to add 8 SATA disks to our SAN, bumping us into a license expansion. The net result of this is that purchasing these disks costs over $16,000.
If that sounds like a lot of money, well, it is. I expected some markup for enterprise-class hardware, but this is ridiculous. A quick search on Newegg shows that hard drives are readily available at about $0.09 – $0.10 per gigabyte, and even Seagate drives are only around $0.14 per gig. At the price I was quoted for the Compellent drives, the price per gig is over $2.00 per gig! The markup is over 1500%, and that’s not even factoring in the discount they likely get for buying disks in bulk – I doubt they pay retail. They claim this is due to the disks being “certified” but I don’t imagine they’re opening up each disk and checking its platters. They probably just make sure the firmware is correct and then ship it out. Their quote also includes 1 year of support on the disks, with 4-hour on-site replacement, but still, as someone who’s basically “cheap,” this just pisses me off.
Now, in Compellent’s defense, their product is amazing, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with the need for it and the means to get it, but it is very pricey, moreso than I was led to believe. The fact that I rarely have to think about the SAN probably means it’s money well spent, but as I said, I’m a cheap bastard, so this bothers me.
Evan Hoffman's Blog 