Predicting where the price of storage will go is a bit like predicting what the effects of global warming will be- fraught with speculation.

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Consider a prediction from Creative Computing magazine in December 1981: “The cost for 128 kilobytes of memory will fall below U$100 in the near future”.
And closer to this age, the San Francisco Chronicle on 27 September 2001 claimed ” RAM (random-access memory) is now at record low prices, with many vendors offering 256-megabyte modules for U$50 or less”.

Despite the amusing nature of these statements, the price of storage is no laughing matter as storage costs typically represent anywhere from 10 to 20 per cent of a company’s total IT hardware expenditure.

So when the head of one of the top global storage technology companies makes a prediction on the future of storage pricing, it’s either the sign of a very brave individual or one that has extremely thick skin.

But that is exactly what Keith Busson, the new Asia – Pacific head of Quantum has done.

In an interview with channelnews.com.au, he noted: “I think that the price of storage will remain fairly constant relative to the technical advancements of the storage infrastructure itself. i.e. current technologies will decrease in price as new technologies emerge however the traditional adage of cost per terabyte/gigabyte will not be a viable measurement point as de-duplication and storage virtualisation mature through to the front end tiers of storage”.

Busson went on further to say that “The price of storage has been typically measured with a $/Gb basis, new technologies like de-duplication throw out this simple measure by giving you more on the same hardware platform”.
Putting another way what Busson says whilst storage as a whole may drop in price overall in time, measuring where the price of storage will go has now become a much more complex deal as new technologies skew the value unit of storage real estate and that predictions on price will become harder to gauge and in empirical terms, become virtually meaningless.

Although on face value it sounds like an each-way bet, in many ways it is one prediction that at least makes some sense: technology advances may require a new formula for the measurement of storage pricing.
And as Busson says, for SMBs, today it’s the protection of that data that is more the issue than the price of storing it. “…the underlying challenge for all is management and protection of that data.”