IBM first to cut storage-on-demand pricing. (Storage News Review).

IBM Corp has beaten rivals EMC Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co by reworking its storage-ondemand pricing scheme to attract customers. The company said this week that it has significantly reworked the scheme which applies to its Shark ESS flagship storage array, and allows disks to be installed in a device but not paid for until they are used. It has cut the price of the scheme, the range of installations it can be applied to, and increased the amount of capacity that can be put on standby.

EMC and HP indicated that they are planning to launch reworks to their capacity-on-demand schemes soon. Randy Kerns, senior partner at storage consultant the Evaluator Group said the schemes were announced a year ago, but have not been very successful.

"Now they're all trying to put a more palatable offering out there," he said. One of the problems was that capacity-on-demand pricing schemes have not previously taken account of the fact that disk prices have for some while been falling by around 10% per megabyte each quarter, Kerns said.

IBM said that it has lowered the "convenience charge" it associates with its scheme, from 25% to 10% of whatever discounted price customers negotiate. The maximum amount of disk that can be installed on stand-by has been increased threefold to 6.9TB, and the scheme can now be applied existing Sharks, and not just new array purchases.