Last week I was in Greensboro and Charlotte, NC visiting with customers who are working on coming up with a reliable and affordable archival storage solutions for day to day usage and also for their disaster recovery solutions.
One customer I met with is a Zerowait SimplStor user and a NetApp support customer of ours. We have been supporting their NetApp equipment for many years, and when they needed an archival solution they chose our SimplStor equipment. We spoke mostly about how to implement scalable storage solutions that will have a service cycle in excess of five years. This customer is tired of the three year forced upgrade cycles that the box selling manufacturers seem to always be pushing. In today’s tighter financial environment there is not budget for three year upgrade cycles. That is a message I have heard a lot over the last couple of years.
Another customer I met with wanted to build his Disaster Recovery solution with homogeneous equipment to what he has in their primary data center. His NetApp salesman will not sell him legacy equipment as the salesman wants him to upgrade both facilities. To put it politely, that isn’t happening with this year’s already stretched IT budget. We discussed the needed speeds and feeds, capacity, and growth and came up with a rough idea that will allow our engineers to put together an affordable homogeneous long term solution that will scale with their growth.