Look beyond price per gigabyte when evaluating all-flash arrays

Yes, I've spent a lot of time with our IT clients talking about this. Basically, if you're measuring it on price per gigabyte, you probably don't understand the value that these all-flash arrays really provide.

All-flash arrays make more out of your other investments, certainly out of your processors, out of your network, out of your applications. They free up a lot of time spent waiting for the storage system to really exploit the value of the investment in those other areas.

So, we try to talk to people asking, What's the net effect of this?

A lot of people are measuring that by doing proofs of concept and then buying based on that. That is much easier than trying to make a decision based on price per gigabyte. So, we try to help coach clients into using something like a TCO calculation over time to show the overall effect on their operations. If you look beyond dollar per gigabyte, the economics are in favor of all-flash arrays.

But that requires a little more thinking. And unfortunately, some of the people inside IT also have to do a little bit of upselling to explain why we can't look at this as a dollar-per-gigabyte pricing.