Yesterday, I was in Maryland visiting some customers. At one location the customer wants to know how much data he can put behind a Netapp 980. He wants 30 TB useable. Officially, NetApp 980’s only support 32 TB raw. And yet we have heard of 980’s going over that limit. The customer has NetApp, Blue Arc and SGI storage. He noticed that his Blue Arc and SGI storage shelves look identical. Same shelves just different bezels.

Like so many of our customers this customer likes NetApp hardware and Zerowait support. NetApp hardware is reliable and easy to manage and Zerowait provides realiable and easy to work with support, and at reasonable prices. Recently we have seen a surge of NetCache customers coming to us for service and support quotes for their equipment. Same equipment, just different bezels ; )

By the way, Robert Pearson responded to a Blog posting by Jon Toigo about NetApp with some interesting comments which ended by pointing out “IMHO, pNFS won’t help much with these lofty but worthy goals, but it will help sell a bunch of NetApps boxen. Lord knows they need help with their design architecture bottleneck.” Many customers are noticing this and that is why transferable licensed boxes are worth so much to savvy customers.