Over the last three weeks we have been in Toronto, Boston, and Anaheim for the Siggraph show. We met with a lot of customers who expressed their concerns about the cost of their NetApp storage and the options that are available today and on the horizon. It was nice to spend a weekend at home after so much traveling
Storage just grows and whether you are in the Government, Energy, Media, Financial, Healthcare, Manufacturing, or the Hosting business sector it is becoming a bigger problem to manage. In the USA, the regulatory environment is increasing the need for storage for many financial and healthcare customers that we deal with. The need for more storage and the cost and training of storage engineers knowledgeable of the proprietary systems sold by NetApp and EMC is adding to the budget and administrative burdens of many IT staffs. Specialist training is expensive.
We have a lot of Financial and Healthcare companies who use our NetApp support services to extend the life cycle of their EOS (End of Support) NetApp equipment. Our list of customers in both of these highly regulated sectors is growing, and they recognize that the need for an affordable tier two storage solution is growing even in these very conservative organizations.
Along with the financial and Healthcare industries, many of our customers in the Energy, Media, and Hosting sectors have adopted our SimplStor storage solutions because a generic tool set and knowledge base are easier to maintain and the costs of training are a lot lower. When your storage is growing at 100% or more a year a proprietary storage solution can get prohibitively expensive to maintain and customers’ recognize we can help them by adding economical SimplStor storage as a part of their data storage strategy.
Manufacturing customers are always looking for ways to cut their operational costs, and we have many manufacturing operations that are using our Zerowait support for their NetApp equipment around the world. As State and Federal regulations increase the requirements for immediate access to archival information, the manufacturing sector has been growing for Zerowait as customers look for a way to meet the new regulations in the most economical way possible.
Storage is a horizontal market, and every organization needs to find a way to control the growth of storage costs. Zerowait has a set of products and services that are recognized by customers around the world in a variety of market segments, and slowly but surely even the US Federal Government is recognizing that there are affordable alternatives to the storage providers they use. Finding personnel trained in the proprietary storage vendors’ tool sets is getting harder as the amount of storage grows. Zerowait can help organizations maintain their NetApp equipment, and with our SimplStor product line we have built a reliable, scalable, and affordable solution that can be maintained by folks with Red Hat and Linux experience. While many Storage vendors are providing a storage solution that works at “the end of the day”, Zerowait is looking at providing a storage solution that has room to grow as tomorrow dawns.
