Price of Storage, Thumper from Sun
Raw disks cost ~$0.5 a GB, and sinking fast. A high-end redundant storage system with all the bells and whistles cost anywhere from $20-50 per usable GB, coming down much more slowly than the price of disks. Only about $2 of the gap could be attributed to redundancy and the cost of hardware needed to process the bits and bytes before delivering them to an application. The remaining costs are accounted by software.
Along comes Sun’s Thumper:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=the_rise_of_the_general
It marries a general purpose OS with storage, and delivers the whole thing at $2.50 per GB - and that box packs 24 TB of storage! Sun is very interesting, again - as a company that uses Java technology extensively, we are very happy to see Sun’s resurgence. Way to go, Jonathan!
Dear Sridhar
My name is Nelson Vinod Moses and I work with Businessworld. I’m doing a cover story on the explosion of tech startups in India.
Could you please provide me some inputs by answering the following questions?
*Do you see SaaS as big opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs?
*How many users does Zoho have? What is the revenue model?
*How important was the contribution of the India development centre in building Zoho?
*Where are you headquartered?
Please do take some time off to answer these questions.
Best,
Nelson