HP also jacks up disk prices in Thai flood wake

We thought EMC was the first major enterprise supplier to raise disk drive prices after the Thailand floods. Not so. HP sent out a letter - pictured here - last month saying it was being forced to increase prices as a result of the hard drive shortage caused by the deadly floods in Thailand. Many of the country's disk assembling …

[icedfusion]

....they are a bit late....

to the party, prices have started to drop already.......

[Anonymous Coward]

Long way to go though...

The 2TB Samsung drives I last bought at £59 inc vat in May are still £109...

[Man Mountain]

HP's prices have gone up around 3-5%! A pretty modest increase in the circumstances and they seem to have done a very good job of insulating their customer base from increases in their costs.

[Dick Emery]

Just you wait...

...warranties will be shortened just like the others I tell thee.

[Chris Schmid]

Time to look out for a different approach to storage utilization

Companies should not accept this and look out for other ways to increase storage efficiency and storage utilization. There are really great technologies out there that can make you more independent from buying more and more storage like dedupe, thin provisioning, NFO (Native Format Optimization), etc.

It is kind of funny to see all that companies being reluctant to adopting new technologies. Consumers who buy a new car hardly accept that the new one consumes as much gas as the old one, still IT departments seem to have settled with the fact that they just need more storage and counted for too much time on falling storage prices...

It is time now to make a real move into "green IT" for corporate IT departments!

Chris Schmid, COO balesio AG

[Ausstorageguy]

Most do.

Chris,

Whilst I partially agree with you, not everything can be optimised, almost every customer I deal with now does use dedupe, thin provisioning, compression, archive and a whole range of methods to reduce their consumption of drives, customers are not reluctant, only weary, but many have adopted such techniques.

But the reality is, even with all that and NFO (Interesing way to plug you business by the way, interesting product, i'm going to look into it more.), companies still suffer data growth.

Not many companies would be able or willing to allow post-processing of their unstructured data incase there was a compliance issue, most but not all systems/applications work well with thin provisioning, compression or even dedupe.

I agree that many more businesses could and should approach this, but to use your car analogy, customers rarely buy a Prius to be green when they need to cross a rugged wilderness and then expect the 4x4 to be every bit as efficient - it's horses for courses.