The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road. –James Thurber
When you are looking to upgrade your storage infrastructure, how do you prioritize your requirements? Most storage customers look at solving today’s problems primarily and then they look to see if they have enough additional storage to handle their expected growth for the next year. They have a given budget which they use to solve this years problems.
The majority of Zerowait’s customers are however looking to maximize the storage capacity and utilization of their current storage assets. Our typical customer has purchased a piece of NetApp equipment that is still underutilized and is looking to maximize his return on storage investment. They do this by upgrading their storage to maximize their storage density, or by purchasing equipment that has legally transferable licenses and meets their performance and storage requirements. Very few of the NetApp 700 Series and 800 series customers we talk to on a daily basis have maximized their units processing and storage capacity. They wonder why they need to upgrade their units to a 900 series or a 3000 series unit.They know they don’t and call us for help in controlling their storage and upgrade costs.
Going to www.spec.org and researching the published NetApp performance documents can help you understand the overall performance specs of newer units against older units. But you have to apply costs to these units to get a real value for your cost of storage. Zerowait can help you do your analysis by providing you current cost data for our stocked units of Licensed filers with NFS, CIFS, Snap mirror and Cluster.
Cost comparisons between storage expansion and storage replacement need to be based on clearly defined goals within your organization. Purchasing new equipment will not guarantee the best cost of storage and performance ratios for your requirements.
