Is your current NetApp ‘Good Enough Technology’?

Does this sound familiar? Although your NetApp hardware is working fine, your NetApp Sales team is proposing a 400% increase in support costs, or an upgrade to a new cDot system which incur the costs and risks of a data migration. Based on corporate belt tightening and the financial news your team is reading an upgrade or 400% increase in support is not going to happen.   Your boss wants to know who can afford that in today’s economy, and asks for alternatives because the Equipment has been stable for years and wants to know why extending the service life should increase your operational costs.  We hear this story often  and below are three solutions that we have provided recently.
A large international resources company with NetApp Filers all over the world wants to keep their Filers but NetApp’s costs are too high. The folks at the company call their peers at other companies  and find out that Zerowait can provide international support at a fraction of NetApp’s prices and the references they check  with tell them Zerowait  support is better than the OEM’s which seems to be cutting back on support and raising its prices. With our quote in hand NetApp  tells the customer that they don’t have to upgrade to cDot and reduces their  continuing support quote  The customer wants to know why  NetApp didn’t provide them the option of staying with 7 mode and  lower prices to start with.
An educational institution that has been using NetApp for many years has instituted a campus wide video monitoring and surveillance system with hundreds of cameras and a long retention period. The amount of storage it is consuming is eating up their Expensive NetApp disk at a growing rate and the data is only accessed occasionally, but when it is needed it is needed quickly. They need an affordable solution with Good Enough Technology that is affordable, and NetApp is not the answer. Zerowait SimplStor is the answer they are looking for, it is Scalable, Predictable, Affordable and Reliable and uses the same Zerowait engineering team for support that they have been relying on for years for their NetApp equipment. In this case the NetApp equipment is good enough but it is not as cost effective as Zerowait’s SimplStor Solution.
A large Biotech company that was an old Zerowait NetApp support customer has switched to another array vendor for their new equipment, and after repeated failures with the new equipment called us up to put his mothballed Netapp equipment back on service as a three – six month interim solution while they determine what they should invest in.  Within 48 Hours we helped them transition back to their ‘Good enough technology’ older NetApp and are helping them evaluate their options to move forward.
Over the next three weeks I will be visiting our growing list of clients in Australia and New Zealand trying to help them find solutions to their growing storage requirements which have to get by with shrinking budgets. During the week of April 18th the Zerowait team will be at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas and we will be having our annual dinner party there for our customers and friends. It seems that no matter where are customers are or what industry they are in our customers are looking for more solutions to their storage cost control issues. And Zerowait has the answer.