I was visiting customers in the New York and Boston areas last week and we were discussing their plans for their storage infrastructure in 2012. We discussed the usual complaints about the high cost of proprietary hardware and software used to manage and maintain their growing storage requirements. But I also heard a lot about and the high cost of tape and archive tape storage.
When visiting with customers it is pretty common to hear complements about how Zerowait’s independent NetApp service and support perfectly fill in the gaps that NetApp leaves with their legacy support policies. NetApp is focused on building and selling new products, and Zerowait concentrates on supporting legacy NetApp equipment. Our business has grown internationally by concentrating on providing storage value into this High Availability niche market.
Last week a majority of the customers that I saw mentioned that they were considering our SimplStor as a complementary storage archive to their LTO tape investments. As I listened to our customers I heard a common theme that Iron Mountain was charging a lot for tape storage. It seems that the point may have been reached where tape storage cost and the SimplStor starting price of $20K for 68TB makes SimplStor as a disk archive a complementary solution to archiving tape. According to one customer I met their ROI for using our SimplStor as a tape replacement was less than 6 months due to the prices of tape library maintenance, cost of tape, and the cost of remote tape storage.
As the overall economy remains in the doldrums many of our customers are looking for affordable alternatives for their secondary and tertiary storage requirements. And it looks like Zerowait has the right solutions for a growing community of enterprise storage users.
