Our customers are right!

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.  

Our customer is right; he understood his data assets and values and saw that by turning the typical data storage model around a bit he can save his company hundreds of thousands of dollars.  This is another example of why it pays to listen to what our customers have to say.

Enterprise Storage in the Crosshairs

The Battles of Storage Features are mostly over; the Battles for Storage Value have begun.

 Over the last few months the stock market has marked a steady decline in NetApp’s market valuation and there are rumors again about NetApp being acquired. While EMC and NetApp fight over market share, storage administrators are looking for ways to squeeze value out of their already existing storage infrastructures. Our customers are asking us for creative ways to add storage to their infrastructures so they can put off buying new equipment.

 

 In this age of storage budget austerity a sudden surge in storage requirements for a new application or database could disable a stable storage infrastructure. Despite the strengths of a well-designed storage infrastructure - a solid operating system, a creative and savvy team of Network and Storage administrators - things could get very ugly very fast in the data center. Nobody wants to be the on-call engineer when the last bit of unassigned storage is used up. Experienced Storage and  Network engineers don’t define ‘professionalism’ as being unprepared; they look for reliable and affordable solutions which they can depend on when the storage hits the fan. 

But if an available storage crisis is easy to imagine, a solution to the crisis is harder to see if your team is myopic and can only see the solutions offered by the big storage providers. Many large companies’ storage infrastructures are so big and complex that the simple and obvious solutions are often overlooked.

One of the easiest solutions to implement are off-lease systems of legacy equipment from the big storage providers that are plug and play and certified by the manufacturer. They’ve been expertly maintained by the manufacturer and are guaranteed to work in your current storage environment. Additionally, there are Open Source High Reliability mass storage solutions available that make migrating secondary storage assets easy and affordable.

Another aspect of Storage Value is extended support. Big storage manufacturers have been blackmailing their customers with their “End of Life.” product announcement threats. They play chicken, hoping that their customers are so frightened by their threat to end support of older systems that they win sales of their newer equipment. But independent support companies provide an alternative to the forced upgrade, with many offering global service, support, and monitoring. A few of these companies have been providing high availability support services for over a decade to the largest companies and government agencies and have a reputation for excellence that surpasses the OEM’s. Many companies now view the OEM’s EOL threats as the shouts of a spoiled child who has lost his advantage to the new kid in town.

Smaller companies and organizations charted the path to independent legacy support years ago because their budgets were already tight and they were not as attractive to the sales team of the big storage OEM’s. But as the world economy encounters more headwinds caused by economic uncertainties bigger organizations are looking for credible storage alternatives. Since the larger companies are staffed with great negotiators who know how to play game, they often will allow an independent service organization into their data center to keep the OEM honest. But as budgetary austerity kicks into high gear the independent storage support provider can provide better and more cost effective service and support than the manufacturer can. The OEM’s now face global competition for their service and support by entrepreneurial and nimble organizations dedicated to outstanding service and support in their chosen niches.

Enterprise Storage manufacturers use the threat of an “End of Life “announcement to induce an unwarranted fear of storage infrastructure collapse within their customers. And in a growing economy with storage budgets in abundance the threats can often drive an organization to make the decision to upgrade to the latest and greatest equipment available. But times have changed, and reliable alternatives exist. The new austerity will likely cause a review of storage assets and upgrade paths. And the best run companies will recognize that maintaining and expanding the reliable equipment they have is much more affordable than the costs involved with buying new equipment and enduring another expensive and lengthy data migration.

The Battle for storage value is already under way. And Zerowait is growing.

Global Conference and Class

Over the last week Zerowait held our Global Conference near Dallas,TX and we also had one of our customer training classes. It has been a great week!

Here are some more shots from the NetApp training class: