A customer called us up recently who had been quoted a price of over $16,000.00 by NetApp for NBD hardware support for his Filer. He was absolutely non plussed over the quote NetApp gave him, and wanted a competitive quote. I explained that we certainly could provide a competitive price quote, but I did not see how NetApp could possibly be charging that much for hardware support for the 3 year old system he was describing. We quoted him significantly less and it looks like we have gained another satisfied customer.

The incident reminded me of a meeting I had in September of 2000. I was meeting with the CIO of a Fortune 100 company and he told me that often it comes down to a decision to buy hardware and software support or to keep talented engineers on staff, budgets are tight and tough decisions have to be made between staff and infrastructure. I sympathized with him and explained that Zerowait’s competitive hardware support prices give IT managers the budget flexibility they need to keep talented staff and maintain their high availability hardware. Of course, readers of this blog already know that! Zerowait provides an alternative to NetApp’s high prices, we’ve been doing it for years and our loyal customer list keeps growing.