Let’s start here: Your NetApp hardware is working fine (as usual), but your NetApp sales rep is proposing a 400% increase in support costs anyway. And, of course, the alternate proposal is an upgrade to a new cDot system, which will involve a risky migration and possible down-time. Even if you liked those options, based on corporate belt tightening and the financial news your team is reading, neither of these is going to happen. Your boss wants to know who can afford to pay these support or upgrade costs in today’s economy, and asks why simply extending the service life of exceptionally stable, but older equipment should explode his operational budget to smithereens.
We hear stories like these from many of our customers and below are three solutions we have recently provided.
In the first case, a large international resources company with NetApp Filers all over the world wanted to keep their filers, but NetApp’s support costs were too high. The folks at the company called their peers at other companies and found out that Zerowait could provide international support at a fraction of NetApp’s prices. Moveover, the references they checked told them Zerowait support was often better than the OEM’s–who seemed to be cutting back on support staff and raising its prices simultaneously. The customer brought this to the attention of their NetApp rep, NetApp blinked, and told the customer that they didn’t have to upgrade to cDot after all, and they could reduce their continuing support pricing as well! The customer wanted to know why Netapp didn’t provide them the option of staying with 7 mode and lower prices to start with. <Crickets>.
In our second example, an educational institution that has been using NetApp for many years instituted a campus wide video monitoring and surveillance system with hundreds of cameras and a long retention period. The amount of storage it requires is eating up their expensive NetApp disk fast. The thing is, the data is only accessed occasionally, but when it is needed it is needed quickly. So they needed a solution with Good Enough Technology that was affordable with reasonable performance, and NetApp was not the answer. Zerowait’s SimplStor was the answer. It is reliable, scalable and affordable. Better yet, SimplStor is supported by the same Zerowait engineering team that they had been relying on for years for their legacy NetApp equipment.
Finally, a large Biotech company that was an old Zerowait NetApp support customer from years past had switched to another array vendor for storage. After repeated failures with the new equipment, they called us for assistance to put their mothballed NetApp equipment back in service for a three to six month interim solution while they determined what they should invest in next. Within 48 hours, we helped them transition back to their Good Enough Technology older NetApp and today we are helping them evaluate their options to move forward.
Speaking of moving forward, I’m going on the road again! Over the next three weeks, I will be visiting our growing list of clients in Australia and New Zealand. Then, during the week of April 18th the Zerowait team will be at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas, and we will be having our annual dinner party there for our customers and friends. It seems that no matter where they are or what industry they are in our customers are looking for more solutions to their storage cost control issues. And Zerowait has the answer.
