Storage suppliers need to advance these capabilities to stay ahead of the free crowd. Snapshots, replication, and thin provisioning should now be considered the very basic elements that a storage system should offer. Unique hardware can be building unique storage hardware to make it harder for the software only data services crowd to catch up. The ability to have NAS and Block services delivered from a single storage system was unique to a couple of vendors a few years ago, now it seems like everyone has it. Unique hardware is not limited to the high end of the market.”]
Source: https://www.darkreading.com/database-security/should-you-be-paying-for-data-services-