Strategy and Tactics- in a changing world
“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

In order to maximize your Storage investments you need to have a stable platform from which to view your infrastructure. Because without a stable point, your can’t apply any long term value to the assets or assign a cost model to the usage of the asset. So to paraphrase De tocqueville, in the storage industry it seems that we have a cadre of managers who regard change as a natural state and who thrive on it.

However, the TCO models that the manufacturer’s in the industry provide are flawed and the make some pretty strange assumptions about cost and performance. Jon Toigo’s Blog points out a serious difference between the performance claims of NetApp and one a customer recently published on the toasters mailing list.

Is it possible to create a reliable cost and performance model when actual customer results are 50% below what the manufacturer claims? It is this disconnect which explains the tremendous growth of our business over the last couple of years. As customers see that their older equipment is stable, reliable and under utilized they seek not to purchase the superseding model of equipment pushed by the manufacturer, but instead they seek to maximize their storage equipment’s unused ability to handle more storage and to reduce their cost per TB of storage they manage.

Zerowait provides our growing list of customers with a cost effective way to manage their storage. And we can provide you with the tools to evaluate your storage infrastructure to see if upgrading your current storage is a better solution then purchasing a superseding unit.

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