Last week I was in New York City visiting with customers who
are trying to figure out how to affordably manage their vast and growing data
archives. They have tried a variety of solutions from start ups and established
vendors but nothing seems to solve the problems of data storage and management
in a way that they need to. They use
NetApp for their tier one storage and have a home built archival solution which
is reliable and affordable, but not a great long term strategic storage solution.
Our customer likes the reliability of their NetApp
equipment, but it is hard to justify the cost of support and license renewals.
Zerowait can provide off lease NetApp filers to them with transferable licenses
and additional storage for their filers to reduce their costs, and like so many
of our commercial customers they have to
find a balance that provides them the NetApp licenses along with the storage
from Zerowait that works for their Tier one storage. Commercial
customers are looking to trim any operational expenses they can while
maintaining the reliability they need.
A lot of our customers have built secondary and tertiary
storage solutions on their own, and I always enjoy conversations with customers
that have done this to learn how they chose the combination of Operating
systems, file systems, disk drive types, and a cornucopia of other choices that
have to be made to create an affordable storage solution that is adaptable and
supportable into the future. The issues of sparing, support, and patches typically
become problematic as the months and years tick by. SimplStor came about
because some of our NetApp support customers recognized that they needed an
affordable archive alternative, but they recognized that they could not support
the product for the 5 year term themselves. Out of that idea, a niche storage
product was born and now it is an international success story.
Our New York customer is an innovator like many of our
customers, and they have some great ideas on how to manage their storage
issues. Balancing end user requirements with the limitations of networks and
storage management can create some interesting one off solutions to problems.
But looking into the future our customers realize that they need a partner that
understands storage and networks and is looking for affordable ways to help
them achieve their long term goals. Does
your organization have a storage strategy on how it is going to support its
current infrastructure in three years? Or are you going to simply select the
most expensive solution offered by your current supplier? Zerowait can help.