MatrixStore Concepts: Pricing/Costs

I have been asked recently to explain our pricing models so here goes.

There are two MatrixStore products:

Mac OS version
Pricing here is simple. It is a software only model. You buy the tin (Xserve, Active Storage XRAID etc, or re-purpose those Xserve RAIDs you are about to refresh) and then buy the software licenses from Object Matrix. The current cost of the Mac OS MatrixStore software is $1000 per usable Terabyte. Thats $1000 for every terabyte of the data you need to protect.

There is a widget available on the OM website which you may use to get a good idea of the costs involved for using this solution. (The widget uses the Promise array but you can substitute that for any array).

The MatrixStore

The pricing for this solution is Node based. The pricing gets better ($ per TB) based on choosing the bigger capacity nodes. The pricing for a cluster protecting 30TB+ comes out at roughly £1.3k per TB of usable data including software and hardware. There is a table and a pricing widget for this solution available on “The MatrixStore” website.

Usable Terabyte

MatrixStore always keeps two copies of the data in a MatrixStore cluster. This is the same irrespective of the version of MatrixStore you wish to use. Two copies. Always. Ensuring your data is always available.

When we talk of a Usable Terabyte it means that the prices generated (using either of the widgets mentioned above) includes protecting two copies.

This implies that if you need to protect 10TB of data you will need 20TB of disk capacity across your 3 (or more). You then have RAID protection so you need to take that overhead into account also. The RAID overhead can differ based on the size of the node (at the moment 9, 12, 18 and 24TB raw).

The best thing to do to work out how much hardware you need is use the widgets above though a general rule of thumb is:

Raw Disk Capacity (TB) = (Your data to protect (TB) * 2) + 10%

That’s a really rough figure but gives you an idea.

Transparent Pricing

OK the prices mentioned above include all MatrixStore functionality. Search, Remote Replication, Compliance, the lot. Everything. No hidden costs.

The View From OM

In both cases the cost of the archive is in the Disk itself, the software layer is a fraction of the total cost. Our main concern was driving down the costs of building large disk based archives which is why we have chosen to provide a platform that utilises Gigabit Ethernet interconnects and enterprise quality, commodity components. Please do get in touch if this is still not clear. We are only too happy to help.