This week we had a conference call with an old customer that has moved on to a new company and  he told his new team about Zerowait and the outstanding service and support we provide to our NetApp  support customers. Suddenly there is a need for additional storage, and budget is tight at his new company so he recommended that it was time to call Zerowait.  Our  customer recognizes that high availability storage can provide years of service beyond the OEM’s End of Life, when you have a reliable service and support organization like Zerowait in your court.  The conversation went well, and it looks like we have added another customer to our list.

Building a global service company that provides individual attention to all of our customers has taken a long time, and the foundation of this company is a great staff that provides honest and dependable service and support that our global customers require.   Folks often ask me how we built a global company and found the business niche.  The truth is that it was our customers who asked us to help them, and by helping folks and treating them right the business grew one step at a time.  Our customers suggested that we build and productize our SimplStor product line. We did, and it is growing steadily in the Energy and Video FX market sectors.

We spoke to many people before we opened up in Europe and we were told that it was nearly impossible to run our type of company there.  We have been in Europe since 2006, and it is a great place to have a business.  When our customers asked us to open up in Australia, we were told by many people that it was too far away and you can’t be successful there.  Our Australian business has grown nicely and we are working on expansion in the region now.

A small business can make a big difference in the world but you need to keep a positive outlook.  As Mark Twain said “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you can become great.”  At the end of the month we are having our first Global Sales Conference in Dallas, TX. At the same time some of our customers will be in a training class during the conference. The class was scheduled at the suggestion of our customers.

It is hard to argue with the logic of storage tiering. The consensus among storage experts is that most stored data is not active data and that it makes economic sense to store it on cheaper disk, tape, or some sort of less expensive storage media. At Zerowait we call this process Right Tiering.

Some organizations tier to public cloud storage providers, and some enterprises try to build their own storage clouds for their storage tiers. But reducing costs for storage is a major concern for all types of customers and each rationalizes their costs, and the security risks of public cloud storage in their own way.

From this Register article it seems that many customers are looking for ways to tier their own storage internally on reliable affordable disks, as Chris Mellor mentions:

“At Western Digital’s executive forum event in Vienna today, a person close to WD said: “In our business 15,000rpm drives are not all dead. In the 2.5-inch, 15K enterprise disk drive area the market is growing. This view is diametrically opposed to the idea – espoused by NetApp a couple of years ago – that disk drive array storage would evolve to flash-and-trash, with primary data stored on flash and everything else on big, fat SATA drives.”

Zerowait’s domestic and international NetApp customers are embracing our SimplStor products as an affordable high reliability Disk Storage solution’s for their archiving and secondary storage needs. And our government customers agree with Nathan Eddy that their storage is growing :

“Agencies need to look at big data solutions that can help them efficiently process, analyze, manage and access data, enabling them to more effectively execute their missions.”

How often do Big Business and Government agree on something? Zerowait’s Government and Business customers agree that Tier one Storage is too expensive. Tthe Federal Government, and most companies with large data storage needs can no longer afford Tier One storage for all of their data storage. As budgets are getting slashed more government agencies, and Corporate IT departments are being forced to Right Tier their storage resources and put archival storage and secondary storage on affordable storage solutions like SimplStor.

If you are looking for a simple way to save on storage, please give us a call or drop us an email.

Over the last few weeks I have been working with several of our international clients in the energy, defense, and media sectors to help them solve some of their big data cost issues. Our customers are using RedHat throughout their enterprises and are looking for affordable big storage solutions.

One of our customers sent us a link a few weeks ago about the updates to XFS and how it is going to be included in the next release of RedHat as a supported file system. The video link below of Dave Chiner giving a talk provides a great overview of how the improved XFS can help our clients manage their large storage requirements.

Additionally, Redhat’s management is aggressively pushing storage development as Jim Whitehurst – RedHat CEO – has said recently:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/27/i-would-like-to-work-at-red-hat/

“Open source is ultimately where all companies are heading,” Whitehurst stated flatly.

“…So far at Red Hat, my focus as been squarely on our datacenter business, trying to execute really well on our core offerings. I think the future is in the cloud and big data. Our acquisition of Gluster last year and the work we have done around these storage offerings gives us a huge opportunity — an opportunity that I think could actually be bigger than the Linux business.”

Our customers tell us that they need a way of controlling their storage costs while maintaining their high availability storage equipment. After all, it was our NetApp support customers that helped us develop our SimplStor product line because they knew that we could provide them with enterprise level service and support for their hardware.

Yesterday I visited a large defense contractor and in addition to the NetApp support he was getting quotes on he wanted to know if our SimplStor products could help him with his large data archiving project without blowing his budget. It was an interesting conversation, and as with so many of our customers there was a recognition that Enterprise hardware support and Enterprise RedHat with a great file system can provide an affordable high availability storage solution.