Why is NFS Sooooo Expensive?

[charterit]

Since it is end of year I recently started getting pricing for various projects next year. Netapp licensing is always expensive but why is NFS licensing roughly $13,000 per filer? Now before you say that Netapp has to pay licensing to Sun in 1989 RFC 1094 (the first open NFS specification) was
published thus allowing no royalties for NFS if you wrote your own NFS code. Hence NFS support under free OS's like Linux, FreeBSD, etc. So is Netapp still buying their code from Sun? Wasn't ONTAP originally based on FreeBSD which includes a rewritten version of NFS??? Seems a little crazy if they used the FreeBSD NFS code or wrote the code themselves they could give it away for free! ...or a the very least a reduced license fee. The reason that I mention this is because I'm hearing tons of Netapp salesmen run around an tell people "Oh NFS is the way to go for VMWare" but they fail to mention how expensive it is when compared to FiberChannel or the free iSCSI. I mean I can buy a Cisco 9124 fiber channel switch, a ton of SFX, Netapp FC lic, and a couple HBA cards for cheaper than the NFS licenses.

Just wondering...

Eric

[BrendonHiggins]

Everything in storage is expensive including my pay, which is nice.

The old cliché "You only get what you pay for" only goes so far...

Other SAN vendors have competing products and when the market share moves to them the price will come down. But while NetApp's solution is the best solution to the problem, people will have to continue paying top prices for the technology. This is a valid business model i.e. Capitalism

If the perfect world, bla bla.

We did not purchase NFS for our VMWare storage as the price was to high in our opinion. If performance on the virtual machines becomes an issue we may have to review if the NFS price is ‘still to high' but currently it does not represent value for money unlike the other NetApp products we use.

Value for money being calculated by the business stakeholders using a list of usable features against a list of prices.

[charterit]

Or something free will come along, like FreeBSD with ZFS, and the market for an option that cost $13,000/per filer license will drop....and no money will be made.

...in case netapp hasn't heard...the economy sucks right now. So telling potential customers about free iSCSI might sell more solutions.

-Eric