We help large organisations right size their infrastructure, choose between on premises, hybrid and cloud on the numbers rather than the fashion, and buy the platform at the right price. The founders spent decades at Dell, EMC and VCE building exactly these quotes, so we know what an effective capacity claim is worth and where the discount really sits. The recommendation is never tied to a product we need to sell. Where we supply, we say so.
Why it is hard
Every storage quote leads with an effective capacity number that depends on a data reduction ratio the vendor chose. Your workload decides the real figure, and the gap is where refreshes go wrong.
Renewal support on an ageing array is priced to make a refresh look cheap. Sometimes it is. Often the right answer is a shorter support term and a better negotiated refresh later.
Committed spend agreements buy a discount by locking in consumption you may not reach. The discount is real. So is the shortfall clause, and it is rarely explained at signing.
Workloads that moved to cloud on a business case built at launch often cost more than the on premises estate they replaced. Whether to bring them back is a numbers question, not a fashion one.
What we do
Choosing between Pure, NetApp, Dell, HPE and VAST on your workload, then negotiating the quote from the vendor side.
An independent read on what you are paying the hyperscalers, what is committed, and where the spend no longer matches the workload.
Whether to move, what to move, and what it will actually cost and take, before you commit to a programme.
Inference, fine tuning and private AI reference architectures sized to the workload rather than the vendor’s quarter.
Deciding what to see, how deeply, and how to get from a symptom to a cause across on premises, cloud and containers.
Immutable backup and recovery designed to a recovery objective, bought at a sensible price, and tied into the security practice.
Proof
A global enterprise ran ageing arrays from several top tier vendors, each bought on a different refresh cycle. We consolidated the estate, cut the cost of running it and improved performance, drawing on the founders’ years inside Dell, EMC and VCE building the very quotes we were now reading. Read the storage case study.
Where to start
A storage, server or cloud proposal you are about to sign. We will tell you where the give is.
A short, independent read on your cloud spend and commitments, with a clear next step.
How to choose an enterprise storage platform on your workload, written by people who used to sell them.
Questions
On the same workload, over the same term, with the same recovery and growth assumptions. Total cost of ownership across storage vendors is hardware, software licensing, support renewals, power and cooling, and the cost of the migration to get there. The headline price is usually the smallest of those over five years. C4C builds that comparison from the vendor side, so the licensing and support lines are modelled the way the vendor will actually bill them.
It depends on the volume, the number of applications touching the data, and whether the move is between arrays or between sites. Professional services, parallel running and the old array’s support overlap are the costs most estimates miss. C4C’s storage migration cost guide gives ranges by size and type, and the migration assessment gives you a figure for your estate before you commit.
Neither by default. Regulated data can sit in cloud with the right controls, and on premises with the wrong ones. The decision turns on data residency obligations, who can access the keys, what the regulator expects to see, and what the two options actually cost over the term. C4C models both and gives you the answer for your data and your regulator, not a general one.
Effective capacity is the usable capacity after data reduction, and the number on the quote depends on a reduction ratio the vendor assumed. Your real ratio depends on your data. If the assumption is optimistic, you buy less capacity than you paid for and refresh sooner than planned. C4C checks the assumption against your workload before the order is placed.
By normalising the proposals to one specification before comparing price: the same usable capacity, the same performance tier, the same support level, the same term, and the same growth allowance. Vendors quote differently on purpose. C4C rebuilds each quote to the same baseline so the comparison is real, then negotiates the one that fits.
Send us the quote or the business case. We will give you an independent view on cloud, hybrid and on premises with the real costs and trade offs, and tell you where the money is.
Talk to us