Sep 22, 2021 — Let’s compare that to Dell’s Cloud Storage Services, which are built out of dedicated hardware attached to the public cloud via direct-connect from a colocation.

There’s nothing intrinsically bad about that approach. After all, NetApp pioneered it with NetApp® Private Storage back in 2013, and we’ve continually made it better and easier to buy by working with partners. But Dell’s dedicated hardware solutions have large minimum capacities, long initial commitment periods, and the kinds of wait times for hardware delivery and installation that are usually associated with legacy data centers, not clouds.

Even their storage-as-a-service model pricing looks more like the kind of high capex numbers that are guaranteed to get an infrastructure team bogged down in analysis paralysis. Isn’t the whole point of cloud about accelerating digital transformation and speed of business? How is that possible when you’re mired in budget discussions and lengthy evaluations?

According to Dell’s website, for a balanced file workload you pay for a minimum of 200TB of capacity for at least one year at $0.1427/GB/month. That assumes that you are using 100% of your storage for the entire contract period. That seems unlikely, given the industry average of 30% to 60% utilization over -a 2-year period. For the time that you’re actually using the service, it’s probably going to cost you more than $0.23/GB/month. You’re also going to have to ask your CFO for more than $350,000, regardless of how much you actually use the storage service.

Dell executives say things like “cloud is not a destination, but an operating model” or that their storage-as-a-service project is superior to AWS by “offering more buying options and flexibility for customers, as well as upwards of 50 percent less expensive.” These kinds of statements make it seem like Dell sees the cloud as a threat, and AWS specifically as a competitor. If so, it shouldn’t be surprising that their storage services look like they are designed to lock you into buying more dedicated Dell hardware and slow down your cloud journey.