Another exasperated NetApp customer!

Over the last couple of weeks I have been visiting customers in Texas and Oklahoma and one customer of ours who went to NetApp to renew support on a FAS32XX filer with minimal storage was apoplectic when he saw the price from NetApp for a support contract. All he wanted to do was put a non-production environment Filer back in a production service environment. So they asked NetApp for a support contract quote. NetApp came back with a quote for over $50K. You could buy a new filer for that. Which is probably NetApp’s plan. Anyway, what caused the outrageous pricing in this case was that NetApp backdated the filer to 2014, when it went off support. Instead of quoting 12 Months, they quoted 33 months, ending in early 2017. Not only did they charge for nearly two years of support the customer would never receive, they also added a reinstatement fee! NetApp should include a prescription for blood pressure pills when they send a quote like that to a customer.

Perhaps this type of predatory pricing makes sense to marketing folks in Silly Con valley. But in the rest of the world folks are looking for alternatives to dictatorial solutions by single source vendors.  Zerowait support is the affordable solution for NetApp support. And thanks to price quotes like this from NetApp, our SimplStor storage sales are growing as people look for affordable solutions without the proprietary software lock in.

In an economic environment of 2% GDP growth customers need a vendor that provides long term service and support at reasonable prices, which is our long term goal.  In this case our pricing helped the customer control his blood pressure without breaking his storage budget.  Another satisfied Zerowait customer.

Does a NetApp cDOT upgrade make sense for you?

Many of our customers are still trying to answer this question and I have had quite a few of our customers send me links to the WikiBon report http://wikibon.com/assessing-the-cost-of-netapp-ontap-migrations-in-oracle-environments/  This report, written by David Floyer, does a very good job of providing an overview of the costs of an upgrade, the risk associated with a data migration, and the performance problems of NetApp’s WAFL architecture in today’s high write and bandwidth intensive environment.

Wikibon – “The breakeven for most migration projects from ONTAP 7-Mode to Clustered ONTAP are poor at over 50 months – the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is anemic at 12% or lower.”  With the economy expected to grow by only 2%, finding extra corporate funds to upgrade is going to be difficult.  Zerowait offers many options to maintain your NetApp equipment on a budget long beyond NetApp’s artificial end of life; we are still providing hardware support for NetApp 700 series systems which were sold at the turn of the century.

Wikibon – “The current systems of record should not be converted to other platforms, as this is both costly and risky.”  In a slow growth economic environment many of our customers find it difficult to add staff, and it is going to be hard to convince the CFO that a risky data migration requiring extra personnel makes business sense.  Zerowait’s technical support engineers are NetApp trained and certified, and we are the recognized experts at maintaining legacy NetApp architectures.  Zerowait’s NetApp support business continues to grow because customers are risk averse, especially when they have tight budgets.

Wikibon – “NetApp’s WAFL architecture is not well suited to high-write and high bandwidth workloads.”  Many of our customers are looking to offload the data streams that NetApp is ill-suited to handle.  Using our SimplStor storage products—a flexible, reliable and affordable alternative—as a complementary storage platform allows System Administrators to tier non-critical storage, the first stepping stone toward building the flexible private cloud that is required by today’s bandwidth intensive compute and write applications.

David Floyer and the Wikibon team have put together an excellent report that we recommend to our customers who are looking to assess the risks and high costs of data migration that NetApp cDot requires.  Zerowait has answers to many of the issues that the report clearly defines and describes.  I recommend that you read this report and jot down your concerns before you meet with your NetApp sales team when you are negotiating for the best price at the end of NetApp’s quarter.

http://wikibon.com/assessing-the-cost-of-netapp-ontap-migrations-in-oracle-environments/