It’s Always Cheaper to Pay Up Front. (Is it?)
There’s the adage that in the long term, paying up front is always cheaper. The message here is intuitive and there are many real-life examples for it (e.g., buying vs. renting cars). Yet, is this concept universally true? When it comes to enterprise storage it is not. On-Premise OpEx storage lets you pay as you go and save. Here’s how.
In order to get them out of the way, let’s begin with the ways one can pay more for storage by not paying up front. For example, when leasing a storage array, one has to pay interest, which by definition increases the price of the product. Even worse, when acquiring storage via managed hosting, the cost increases in two ways – the first is the cost of financing the product and the second is the cost of the managed services. In short, of course there are ways to spend more money by paying over time. That’s neither new nor interesting. Let’s instead focus on how to save money on enterprise storage by paying-as-you-go.
In other words, what if enterprise storage could be like a flexible car rental – no up-front cost, no long-term commitment, and with the ability to change the type and size of models as needed – yet cheaper both in the short- and long-term?
Saving Money While Gaining Storage Freedom and Flexibility – How is that Possible?
If saving money while gaining freedom and flexibility sounds like having your cake and eating it, you’re hardly alone. That is the most common reaction our customers have when we first tell them about what we do. But given that they are paying customers you can correctly conclude (spoiler alert!) that what we promise is what we deliver.
How do we do that? There are three ways by which we make the seemingly impossible possible.
1. No Costs for Hardware Development
The first one, we hope, is fairly obvious. Unlike traditional storage systems, Zadara Storage Clouds use only mass-produced components procured via the open market. This means that our hardware cost is as low as it can be, and that we don’t have to spend a penny on hardware development. In other words, we developed Software Defined Storage to (among other things) dramatically reduce the cost of the hardware.
2. Avoid CapEx
The second way by which we save our customers money is by demanding no up-front payment. Zadara customers, whether they use our award-winning Virtual Private Storage Arrays™ on-premises or in the cloud, pay only in arrears and based on actual usage. This means no expensive purchase, no CapEx (capital expenditures), and no depreciation schedule. That translates to big savings on Day One. But what about the months and years that follow?
3. Always Aligned – Grow, Change, or Shrink
The long-term savings come from the third way by which we save you money, which is by offering the fast flexibility that I mentioned before. Because we provide our customers the ability to grow and shrink their usage as their requirements change, and given that this ability is practically instant, our customers don’t have to pay for capacity that they don’t use. No more over-purchasing, no more advance planning, no more gobs of unused capacity. In other words, you pay only for what you need today and, should your performance and/or capacity needs change in the future (be it upward or downward), simply change your storage configuration. This efficiency translates into big bucks and (no small thing) it also saves a lot of time previously spent on trying to predict future storage needs.
The Bottom Line is the Bottom Line
In short, thanks to a new architecture and a re-thinking of the tired, old storage business model, Zadara Storage offers—and its customers enjoy—enterprise storage with freedom, flexibility and cost savings which were not previously possible.
Skeptical? See this TCO Study by The Evaluator Group showing how Zadara Storage saves customers money, even 10 years down the road.