Over the last couple of weeks I have been visiting
customers in Colorado and found that many of NetApp’s customers are distressed
by the costs of upgrading to OnTap 8.2, which include new hardware (in many
cases), training and data migration. Migrations are never easy, and with the
corporate mantra these days being “doing more with less” finding spare cycles
in an IT department to develop and document the migration plan, then schedule
and implement it with limited staff is alienating many of NetApp’s customers.
The majority of IT departments don’t have the expertise
to handle data migrations, and justifying another proprietary upgrade for
storage hardware is at odds with management’s push to reduce costs (both
capital and ongoing support) using open source and commoditized solutions. These
customers, and many more, are yearning for an affordable storage solution for
tomorrow and the next 5 years or more, and the media is beginning to notice.
Is this perception true? Possibly – and the IDC numbers and
NetApp’s own recent
results, with flat-lining revenues indicate that something is not quite
right in Sunnyvale. The filer lion king is turning, just maybe, into a floppy
old beast and needs to reinvigorate its carnivore approach to the storage
business.
In a tough economy, storage administrators need a trusted
advocate on their side to help bend the costs down and Zerowait has a set of
alternative solutions to help customers whether they want to maintain their
legacy NetApp infrastructure, migrate to an affordable and reliable open source
solution, or migrate up to 8.2. In addition to providing long term legacy
NetApp support, allowing you to capture the maximum ROI from your current
NetApp investment, our engineering staff has the broad storage and network
experience to provide assistance in data migrations, whether supplementing your
staff or managing a turn key migration. And for those looking to contain costs
by taking advantage of the open source x86 environment, our SimplStor product line
delivers highly reliable, affordable storage with the enterprise support and auto
notification limited IT staffs need to ensure availability.
Zerowait has support, migration, and alternative hardware
solutions that will help you build a bridge to your Future data storage requirements.
www.zerowait.com
