So let’s say you own a storage system and you want to triple its capacity. Well, unfortunately for you that means another system, because it is very likely that your system doesn’t support another 16 storage shelves or if you added them the performance of the system would go into the crapper.

So you buy another system instead of expanding the old one.  At first this may not seem so bad, as you need the storage shelves anyway, so adding them to an old system versus getting a new shiny one doesn’t seem so bad….until you have to buy WAFL, ONTAP, NFS and CIFS protocols, all over again. Wait a minute, can’t I just put those shelves on my old system – I already bought that stuff!

Well, no you can’t Mr. Network Appliance Guy.  You could upgrade platforms, and then get that performance as the new one has a bigger back-end so you can attach the disk you want. Well, not only do you need a forklift for that upgrade, but you will pay more for the software again, because they charge more for the same software on the bigger platform than when it is loaded onto the smaller one. Get ya either way.

Unless you own an Axiom. With Axiom you can add up to 64 Bricks of SATA and/or FC disk to scale your back-end performance and capacity, as well as up to 4 Slammers to scale your front-end performance, and use the software you bought originally – same license, under the premise that it “scales”….because viola! It does.

Not a nice change for most storage vendors, but certainly a nice change for storage customers.