Is Elmer Fudd in sales?
On Wednesday , we received a phone call from a NetApp customer, that had been told by his sales representative, that he should always purchase two or three times the storage he needs, just to be safe. He called us to see what our take of the situation was. I asked how the determination was made that he needed more storage? Did anyone review his storage capacity and usage profile? What were his storage growth projections? There are many reasons to ask these basic questions but they come down to one really good reason. Since storage goes down in price relative to capacity over time, it makes financial sense to buy the least amount of storage you will need at the time of purchase. History has clearly taught us that adding storage capacity will be cheaper in the future.

When a company calls us to do a storage evaluation we typically run some of our scripts to get an idea of each of the following areas:
1) What is the usable storage on the filer.
2) What is the total capacity of the filer
3) What is the Snap Reserve on the filer
4) What is the percentage of used space by file extension.
5) What is the age profile of the files.

Within few minutes we can tell what the access profile of the filer is and quickly help our customer create a storage plan that makes budgetary sense. Most of the time, our customers find that simply adding some Zerowait storage shelves and disks and reorganizing their current storage configuration is all that is needed. But whether our customer needs our help in configuring their storage, migrating data or adding capacity, they know they can trust Zerowait to provide the best service and support available for NetApp equipment.