There’s so much competition in online enterprise storage now that price wars are coming to the fore. But hey, that’s capitalism — you can spend your capital anywhere you want.
Symform, a new Seattle-based online storage service provider, is jumping into battle with established competitors like EMC Mozy Pro, Amazon S3, Acronis, i365, CommVault, Box, Dropbox, Carbonite and a list of others.
Besides providing a secure, reliable, easily accessible enterprise cloud storage service, Symform is competing aggressively on pricing by offering unlimited online data storage in the Symform Storage Cloud for a flat fee. That’s right. Unlimited. Flat fee. This might be a first in this sector.
Secondly, another real differentiator is that Symform examines an entire system and looks for unused storage in arrays, PCs and servers that can be used in this mix. What a smart idea to put idle machines to work in storage if they’re not doing anything else.
“The traditional cloud storage model is broken because companies are spending more money every time they need additional storage, when they already have resources in place to back up and protect the data,” Praerit Garg, president and co-founder of Symform, told The Station.
“It shouldn’t cost $12,000 or more a year to store 2TB in the cloud when you can buy a 2TB drive for $80. Symform is revolutionizing cloud storage by providing all the benefits of the cloud at local storage pricing — and we guarantee it.”
Here are three examples of what Symform is talking about (based on published pricing as of Feb. 21, 2011, and assuming individual PCs store 100GB and servers store 1TB):
–For up to 50 employees and 2 servers: Symform: $1,800; Acronis: $3,500; MozyPro: $40,000 –For up to 100 employees and 5 servers: Symform: $3,600; Acronis: $7,500; MozyPro: $90,000 –For up to 1,000 employees and 50 servers: Symform: $24,000; Acronis: $75,000; MozyPro: $900,000
Symform’s flat fee Corporate Pricing Program:
—Guarantees cloud storage savings of at least 50 percent or more annually for companies storing data in the cloud under the current model. This price advantage increases as a company’s storage needs grow, Garg said.
—For businesses with large amounts of data, servers or locations, Symform can be up to 10 times cheaper than its competitors because it puts a business’s unused storage resources to work across the extended enterprise.
—All corporate laptops and desktops are included in this pricing, so CIOs don’t have budgets driving the choice of devices and data to protect.
The Station says check it out.
