Other information technology companies have been introducing pay-as-you-go pricing plans as part of a wider industry push toward making computing more like a utility. But Sun's initiatives have been among the most unusual, such as an offer to let governments in developing nations pay for software based on the number of citizens and how developed the country is.
In that sense, the new services and storage pricing models aren't a radical shift in direction for the company. With its new Preventive Services offering, Sun aims to give customers a set of multiple services covering Sun gear at a single price. The package, designed to help customers avoid problems in the first place through diagnostic checks, is priced based on factors such as the number of data centre employees and the complexity of the hardware and software in use.
In addition, Sun said customers who meet and sustain performance goals in their data centre will be offered discounts of up to 20 percent off long-term services subscription costs. Sun already has been making a push to offer preventive services, as its services efforts have expanded and become more important to the company.
On the storage front, Sun says it will let customers pay $1.95 per gigabyte per month for use of a high-end disk array product, along with some software and services. Sun requires that customers sign up for at least 30 terabytes of storage and agree to a three-year contract.
Customers can pay additional amounts per month for features such as performance monitoring.
According to Sun's calculations, this utility computing approach permits a customer using 30 terabytes of capacity to pay roughly a third of what they would if they purchased or leased the storage gear.
Michael Isaac, analyst at researcher Saugatuck Technology, finds the offer wanting when it comes to flexibility. "By locking in a commitment for, say, 3 years to get $1.95 per gigabyte per month, Sun's subscription pricing still falls considerably short or the true vision of pay-as-you-go pricing where you can scale up or down, depending on need," he said.
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