A step at a time

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.

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