This week, Microsoft announced a 26% price drop on Hot block blob storage, and an even more significant 38% lowering for Cool block blob storage.
We have reduced prices on Azure Storage offerings - Hot Block Blob Storage, Cool Block Blob Storage by up to 31% and 38% respectively.
Venkat Gattamneni Director, Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure
Public cloud infrastructure is a commodity play that will, over time, offer lower and lower prices. The stiff competition between the big cloud players – AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle – means downward pressure on prices and a continuous drive to innovate on value-adds like software, integration, and a vibrant partner ecosystem.
As a client of cloud solutions, especially in the realm of archiving and cloud storage gateways, you should be thinking about how to take advantage of this paradigm.
Unfortunately, many vendors offer commercial models that lock you into term commitments which typically involve purchasing cloud capacity upfront at today’s prices. If you do this, any future price reductions introduced by the public cloud provider are pocketed by your software/solution vendor. The concept is similar to buying a storage array; you spend money today to buy capacity at today’s storage prices. It does not make sense when you know that storage prices have always been trending downward, and the public cloud model enables you to pay only for the capacity that you use.
At HubStor, we have devised a commercial model that seamlessly and instantaneously passes the price reductions directly on to our clients. We also explicitly state in our subscription agreements a guarantee to never raise our markups for the life of each client’s tenure with us. That means HubStor customers can secure a predictable markup schedule for our service and then dynamically ride Azure’s future price reductions in our pricing.
According to the Microsoft blog post, the new Azure storage prices went into effect on February 6, 2017. When we generate invoices in the first week of March for February’s monthly consumption, each client will realize the changes. For example, 125 TB on Cool LRS in January cost $1,250 to store for the month, but going forward it will have a monthly Azure price of $775 (or $74.40/TB/year).
Visit the HubStor pricing page to see our latest pricing table, understand how our model works, and even request an estimate based on a configuration that meets your specific needs.
