Customer Designed Storage

Last week I met with a number of our customers in the Boston area and the issues they were dealing with illustrate the problems that many storage administrators have – tight budgets, limited storage capacity for anticipated storage growth and limited staff.

I met with the team at one of our oldest customers and they are trying to stretch their budget to handle requirements for onsite production and offsite storage. Their FAS3050’s are running fine and still have capacity to handle more storage. There is no budget to upgrade these FAS3050’s as NetApp would like them to do so they are going to keep these high reliability heads running for as long as possible with Zerowait supporting them with parts and service. Additionally, they have been using our SimplStor units for a few years now and find they are an affordable and reliable way to archive, so they are going to use an additional SimplStor as an offsite remote tape replacement.

Another customer I met with has a large user who has recently purchased a large Linux Cluster with projections that it will double its storage requirements in 2013. Additionally, the nature of the modeling requires a lot of writes which slows down the NetApp infrastructure to handle the concurrent demands of VMware and Oracle for their business requirements.  During our discussion of options for the big Linux cluster the customer asked if we could build our SimplStor with Solid State Drives. He prefers to work with a company he knows that has been providing service and support for over two decades as opposed to some VC backed Startup Company with no history at all.  I told the customer about our new SSD version of SimplStor and how we are carefully rolling it out to select customers to make certain that each unit works flawlessly in their datacenters. Over the holidays our engineers will be working with the customer looking at his logs and discussing his system usage to come up with the best solution.  As a service and support business our engineers are encouraged to spend the time to help the customer understand the nature of his bottlenecks and find the best solutions.

Another Boston customer is in the midst of a corporation wide shift in their data system architecture and needs help moving their petabytes of data to different locations. This is a big job and they want us to help them by providing storage resources and engineers to assist at the various sites.There is storage strategy, logistics, security, and technical expertise needed for this job and our customer knows he can depend on our engineering staff to help them make this big project go as smoothly as possible.

2012 is ending a lot like it began for Zerowait; helping our customers find affordable solutions to their biggest data storage problems. Zerowait has grown in 2012 and we expect to grow again in 2013, and based on the quotes we have out I think we are going to have a very busy first quarter.

Thank you all for a great year!

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