To give you a better idea of what this means, here are some actual examples. We have a client folder in our Sarasota office which contains the current advertising files which are currently under production. This folder is about 85GB. While this might not seem like a huge volume if you’re a large company, I would argue that it’s a good size folder for an office of less than 20 people. We have one office which currently has no Creative staff, and the client folders in that office are less than 10 GB in size. Again, these examples are from our smaller offices. The file size dilemma becomes larger when you look at us as a whole and include our larger offices in the equation. I’ve had vendors tell me that we’re more like a 3,000 employee company when you consider our storage needs, and we currently have about 275 employees.

Copying 85GB across our WAN in order to have a live copy of our Sarasota clients folders is not an option for today. However, we are looking at tools for replication and data deduplication which might allow us do just that. For now, we’ll have to settle on backing things up the old-fashioned way, using tapes and off-site storage. It works, but it would certainly be nice if I had an up-to-date copy of my Sarasota client folders sitting here in Syracuse, ready to be brought to life if necessary. It’s one of our goals to have such a system in place in the next year or so.

How would we like it if Cisco or HP suddenly decided to adopt a new pricing model for their network switches? What if this new pricing model required that we had to pay more based on the volume of data moving through the switch? This model would be prohibitively expensive for those of us who routinely move big Photoshop files around. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense, because it’s the same switch whether you’re moving around Word documents or Photoshop files. Thankfully, things don’t work that way in the switch world. You purchase the switch you need, and pricing varies depending on the switch’s speed and the number of ports. The pricing model makes sense.

This brings me to a couple of vendors who apply a different model in order to recoup their development costs. For the past several months I’ve been in discussions with Bakbone about their backup products. Bakbone uses a pricing model where you’re asked to pay based on the volume of data you’re backing up. We’ve also purchased network acceleration devices from Expand Networks in the past 12 months. In Expand’s case, the pricing model is based on the amount of bandwidth being accelerated. In both cases, the smaller company which has large storage and bandwidth needs is penalized. The pricing model works a whole lot better if you’re saving and moving Word documents than it does for Photoshop documents.

In the case of backup software, if I’ve already spent the money for the drive space to store my backups, why on earth should I have to pay a software vendor based on how much data I’m backing up? Does the software have to work any harder in order to back up more stuff? In the case of network acceleration, if I’ve already purchased a piece of hardware which is sufficient for my bandwidth needs, why do I have to pay more to accelerate 20MBps than I do to accelerate 10MBps? The hardware hasn’t changed. I’m already paying my ISP for the bandwidth. Isn’t the whole idea of a network acceleration device that I get more bandwidth for the buck? It feels to me like I’m paying for that extra bandwidth either way.

For a company such as ours, where our data and bandwidth needs tend to be excessive, and out of proportion to other companies of our size, these pricing models are prohibitively expensive. A pricing model based on users or connections makes much more sense for us. It’s been a good lesson for me. In the case of Expand we’ve been very happy with the product itself. Their network acceleration appliances work well, and we’ve managed to work out the pricing issues so far. However, this could be an ongoing battle as our company grows, and I don’t particularly relish the thought of revisiting these pricing issues every time we add an office or renew our support contracts.

It’s been a valuable lesson learned for me, and it’s one I’ll pay a lot more attention to in the future. Because our storage and bandwidth needs are out of proportion to our size, basing a pricing model on these elements just doesn’t work for us.