Our Customer is Right

Multi Billion Dollar storage vendors fear the evolution of generic storage solutions which seem to be growing more robust and reliable monthly.  If your company is locked into a storage vendor’s feature sets and they are making an effort to force you to upgrade, what affordable choices are available that can meet your growing storage needs when there is no more budget for additional resources?

The first option that comes to mind was touched on in last week’s blog.  If your budget is tight and you are locked into your vendor’s feature sets, why not purchase the Vendor’s off lease equipment? This equipment has been expertly maintained by the Vendor as part of their lease agreements and is certified by the vendor for installation and resale. This is a simple, obvious, and affordable solution embraced by Zerowait’s customers around the world.

The second option is to look into creating tiers of storage based on your company’s own usage patterns. Almost every study agrees that well below 25% of storage is first tier data required to be on high availability storage. Additionally, the studies show that most data is rarely accessed after the first 90 days. That is why a lot of companies migrate data based on date of last access to a secondary storage array. There are multiple software programs to do this and many techniques have been around for decades. Implementation is easy, the cost of secondary storage is affordable as storage requirements grow, and organizations are quickly recognizing the value of storage tiers.

While these two options seem to cover most of our customers’ needs, occasionally we have a customer who has a different need. Last week I wrote about the battle for storage value, and coincidentally this week we heard from a customer of ours that wants a substantial number of our SimplStor units for a very specific task in their field offices to transmit data to their central data facilities. They have many field data collection points, and the data is increasingly valuable as it is aggregated with other data. Field collection can be on affordable, high reliability SimplStor servers. The data on the SimplStor equipment will then be aggregated onto off lease high availability NetApp equipment, which is affordable, in stock, and easily expandable. And when that data is used for modeling it will be uploaded to the latest generation NetApp filers, direct from the manufacturer, for optimum performance.

Our customer is right; he understood his data assets and values and saw that by turning the typical data storage model around a bit he can save his company hundreds of thousands of dollars.  This is another example of why it pays to listen to what our customers have to say.

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