David, I'm saying that the Cost of Goods for an Enterprise storage Disk Assembly includes the costs to the vendor to develop, build, warranty and maintain the controller before mark-up is applied, and that the COG for a disk drive assembly is much higher than just a single hardware component.
I really struggle with the fact that you think that the cost of goods for a disk drive assembly includes the disk drive and nothing else. Would you argue with David Bowie or Amazon about the price you pay for a CD that you can buy at Fry's for 20 cents. They're making 5400% mark-up on the cost of materials. Surely the jewel-case isn't worth $5-10. FICON and SATA are published standards. There's nothing stopping your company from having you build and support their Mainframe DASD storage controller for them. You're going to sell, ship, install and maintain it with just 500% markup on the disk drives, and this will cover the cost of a separate engineering and R&D department so you can develop and test new standards like zHPF. And when IBM holds their hand out for license fees for FlashCopy, PPRC and HyperPAV you'll just pay them and not bother your boss if he isn't using that software. Personally I think that with 500% markup on off the shelf components you will be hard pressed to even buy a z196 to hook up for pre-ship Q&A. Perhaps you would be happier with a service model where you get charged per minute every time you call the Salesman, SE or CE, and the salesman charges you for a quote if you buy storage from another vendor. Back before the EMC/HDS price war in 2000 the mark-up on cost of goods - what we pay for the hardware - was quite high, but I think you would be horrified to know what it dropped to by 2001. It was certainly never 500%. Only Mainframes CPUs have that sort of markup. I agree the way you state the price differential makes for pervasive argument, but by excluding even basic costs like shipping and installation I feel that it is a tad misleading. Ron > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > Dave Kopischke > Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 7:58 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [IBM-MAIN] When will MVS be able to use cheap dasd > > On Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:19:57 -0700, Ron Hawkins wrote: > > > >I'd like to know if the Seagate or Hitachi drive from Fry's includes an > >account SE, a CE to install it, phone home monitoring, non-disruptive > >replacement, a dynamic spare, FC or SAS active/active dual ports, and > access > >to a guy like me with a lab to recreate and advise on your critical > >performance problems? > > > >Does someone turn up in the middle of the night with a replacement when a > >drive you purchase from the internet dies, or does it take a month to get a > >replacement under warranty? Like the old adage says "you get what you pay > >for." > > I'm not passing judgement. Just tossed a fact or two out there. But since you > ask, how about they limit themselves to 500% markup ??? Or 600% ??? That > still cuts our cost more than half. > > >And of course it is not price gouging for Mainframe disk. You vendor will > >add all that support cost, margin, whatever, whether it's formatted for > >Mainframe or Open Systems. Do you think that your argument is a bit like > >using the primary cost of rubber to compare the cost of the windshield wiper > >blades on my Mustang with a Ferrari. > > No, I don't. I have no problem with anyone making a decent profit. But what is > a decent profit ??? Are you saying they charge us 15 times retail for a disk > so > they can give us all the cool software that makes it all work for free ??? > > Every piece of that hardware has a cost associated with it. Even the power > cords are separately priced. It's just a whole lot easier to compare when they > throw a shiny cabinet around commodity disk. Kind of maddening actually, but > whatever. I'm not even saying it's not worth it. It works great. I wish I > would > have thought of it... > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO > Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
