Multi Billion Dollar storage vendors fear the evolution of
generic storage solutions which seem to be growing more robust and reliable
monthly. If your company is locked into
a storage vendor’s feature sets and they are making an effort to force you to
upgrade, what affordable choices are available that can meet your growing
storage needs when there is no more budget for additional resources?
The first option that comes to mind was touched on in last
week’s blog. If your budget is tight and
you are locked into your vendor’s feature sets, why not purchase the Vendor’s off lease equipment? This equipment has been expertly maintained by the Vendor
as part of their lease agreements and is certified by the vendor for
installation and resale. This is a simple, obvious, and affordable solution
embraced by Zerowait’s customers around the world.
The second option is to look into creating tiers of storage
based on your company’s own usage patterns. Almost every study agrees that well
below 25% of storage is first tier data required to be on high availability
storage. Additionally, the studies show that most data is rarely accessed after the first
90 days. That is why a lot of companies migrate data based on date of last
access to a secondary storage array. There are multiple software programs to do
this and many techniques have been around for decades. Implementation is easy,
the cost of secondary storage is affordable as storage requirements grow, and
organizations are quickly recognizing the value of storage tiers.
While these two options seem to cover most of our customers’
needs, occasionally we have a customer who has a different need. Last week I
wrote about the battle for storage value, and coincidentally this week we heard
from a customer of ours that wants a substantial number of our SimplStor units
for a very specific task in their field offices to transmit data to their
central data facilities. They have many field data collection points, and the
data is increasingly valuable as it is aggregated with other data. Field
collection can be on affordable, high reliability SimplStor servers. The data
on the SimplStor equipment will then be aggregated onto off lease high availability
NetApp equipment, which is affordable, in stock, and easily expandable. And when
that data is used for modeling it will be uploaded to the latest generation
NetApp filers, direct from the manufacturer, for optimum performance.