An Article worth reading in Computerworld

I have written about this issue many times before, but it seems that the Main Stream Tech Media is finally picking it up.

Most savvy enterprise storage customers understand that to get a decent ROI they need to get a usable life of at least 5 years. So, how come the big three storage vendors raise maintenance costs exponentially for systems that are more than 3 years old? A lot of our customers have read the big three’s ROI spreadsheets and calculations that show customers how if they spend hundreds of thousands now to replace their out of maintenance equipment with new, that over 3 years (the vendor desired life of the new equipment) that you’ll actually save money. Then they call Zerowait, and they see a whole new world on what ROI means.

The hardware vendors make money by forcing you to do a forklift upgrade after 3 years. Zerowait’s business model works because we help our customers extend their ROI calculations well beyond 3 years. When a customer extends their systems lifespan they also don’t need to purchase new or upgraded Backup software or monitoring software. There is no additional employee training, or implementation costs. Our customers save on maintenance costs and all of the secondary & tertiary costs also.

So how come vendors don’t include all of these additional infrastructure costs in their little spreadsheet from the marketing department? How much money would you save if you get 3rd party support (for a fraction of OEM support cost) and keep the old stuff around for another 2 years? Certainly that “enterprise class” system you bought 3 years ago is still a good system. It was enterprise class when you bought it, did it stop being enterprise class when the manufacturer’s new model came out?