We have a big investment in VMWare at the moment, but will seriously be looking at RedHat Enterprise Virtualization going forward. Their management client is starting to look as good as vCenter and the price is way way way less. We're looking at about a factor or 8 less. So do we want to spend $40,000 for finicky hardware requirements and constant marketing-driven name changes or do we want to pay $5000 to install RHEV on whatever nice servers we have already sitting around. We're going to be voting for the latter.

In a government agency we're charged internally $8/GB/yr for online storage. We have a hot replica ready to come online if the primary goes down for any reason, it's incrementally backed up to tape (using Tivoli) each night and the encrypted weekly tapes are transferred to an offsite location each week.

All that for $8/GB/yr. Supposedly that's the cost-neutral point for them including hardware maintenance, salaries, power, cooling, etc.