Price-wise, the solution is cheap. I rate it a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is very cheap, and ten is very expensive. The licensing for the solution needs to be taken care of on a yearly basis. Our company has an IT person who takes care of the payment part of the solution.

Dell EqualLogic PS series can improve its scale-out feature. Sometimes the customer has a limited budget for storage expansion. When they want to expand their capacity, they need to buy a complete controller plus storage capacity, which sometimes is out of their budget. If Dell EqualLogic PS series support could scale up the environment in which only hard drive extension controllers should be supported, then customers can expand within a lower budget.

There are far more advanced solutions on the market than the Dell EqualLogic PS series. I would not advise people to buy it anymore because it is not out of life now. The Dell PowerStore and Dell EMC Unity are much better, this is not because the Dell EqualLogic PS series was not good, but because these are advanced and newer models.

I rate the price from Dell EqualLogic PS series a six out of ten.

I didn't buy it. It was another person seven years ago. So, I don't really know, but all storage platforms cost a lot of money. It is probably in the mid-range, but you get what you pay for.

We always do the original acquisition with five years of maintenance. That package includes all upgrades and whatnot. There are annual maintenance costs beyond the original licensing period. So beyond year five, if we do keep an array beyond that, it is about $5,000 per array. That would be probably about $15,000 annually for arrays that we plan to keep into year six and year seven.  

The price became a lot more attractive as the years went by. Initially it seemed like it was a high-priced solution, but as the years went by the price, performance, and just the cost of ownership went down a lot.  

I don't have any insights into the licensing costs or how often we pay any licensing fees.

I'm not sure what the exact costs of the solution were originally. I don't have access to that information.

We pay for licensing on a monthly basis.

Over the six years we've had the solution, the pricing has been rather reasonable. That said, we're always looking for solutions that allow us to lower costs.

Licensing is pretty straightforward.

It is a fair price.

All features are out of the box. The license will be in the virtual, OS, or application layer.