Quinn Raises Storage-Software PricesQuinn Raises Storage-Software Prices

The week after the Fed reduced the prime rate by a quarter point and speculated about continued hard times, W. Quinn Associates Inc. celebrated Independence Day by raising prices. Quinn sells storage-resource-management software for the Windows NT/2000 market. It jacked up prices at a time when other IT vendors are ducking.

Versions for Windows NT, 2000, and Advanced Server will cost more than 40% more. But the Windows 2000 Data Center version will cost more than four times as much. StorageCentral for Windows NT, 2000, and Advanced Server costs $1,295. The Windows 2000 Data Center version costs $4,995.

StorageCentral tracks storage systems and reports on their use via 35 Web-based reports that are part of the product. Customers like Prudential could reduce storage-hardware costs, cut management and people costs related to manual administration, and curb storage-system sprawl by using hardware more efficiently.

Arthur Garces, VP of software systems engineering at Prudential Financial in Newark N.J., oversees 2,000 Windows Servers from Compaq and IBM and every single one has its own direct-attached storage. Prudential is testing StorageCentral SRM from W. Quinn with hopes it will help Garces and his team get a handle on those 2,000 systems. Currently, they don't know which are at capacity and slowing down apps and which are only using a fraction of their capacity.

"ROI for these products will be realized the moment we take on any more capacity," says Garces. He says storage growth has been phenomenal but he couldn't say for sure how much because he doesn't have a tool like StorageCentral. With such software, Prudential will move to networked storage, consolidated IBM and Sun Unix servers, and business continuity. According to Garces, "We can't achieve business continuance until we separate servers from the storage because it would be too hard to keep every single server available all the time. We'll have multiple servers sharing storage and achieve it that way."