Does a NetApp cDot upgrade make sense for you?

Many of our customers are still trying to answer this question and I have had quite a few of our customers send me links to the WikiBon report http://wikibon.com/assessing-the-cost-of-netapp-ontap-migrations-in-oracle-environments/ This report, written by David Floyer, does a very good job of providing an overview of the costs of an upgrade, the risk associated with a data migration, and the performance problems of NetApp’s WAFL architecture in today’s high write and bandwidth intensive environment.

Wikibon“The breakeven for most migration projects from ONTAP 7-Mode to Clustered ONTAP are poor at over 50 months – the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is anemic at 12% or lower.” With the economy expected to grow by only 2%, finding extra corporate funds to upgrade is going to be difficult. Zerowait offers many options to maintain your NetApp equipment on a budget long beyond NetApp’s artificial end of life; we are still providing hardware support for NetApp 700 series systems which were sold at the turn of the century.

Wikibon – “The current systems of record should not be converted to other platforms, as this is both costly and risky.” In a slow growth economic environment many of our customers find it difficult to add staff, and it is going to be hard to convince the CFO that a risky data migration requiring extra personnel makes business sense. Zerowait’s technical support engineers are NetApp trained and certified, and we are the recognized experts at maintaining legacy NetApp architectures. Zerowait’s NetApp support business continues to grow because customers are risk averse, especially when they have tight budgets.

Wikibon“NetApp’s WAFL architecture is not well suited to high-write and high bandwidth workloads.” Many of our customers are looking to offload the data streams that NetApp is ill-suited to handle. Using our SimplStor storage products—a flexible, reliable and affordable alternative—as a complementary storage platform allows System Administrators to tier non-critical storage, the first stepping stone toward building the flexible private cloud that is required by today’s bandwidth intensive compute and write applications.

David Floyer and the Wikibon team have put together an excellent report that we recommend to our customers who are looking to assess the risks and high costs of data migration that NetApp cDot requires. Zerowait has answers to many of the issues that the report clearly defines and describes. I recommend that you read this report and jot down your concerns before you meet with your NetApp sales team when you are negotiating for the best price at the end of NetApp’s quarter.

http://wikibon.com/assessing-the-cost-of-netapp-ontap-migrations-in-oracle-environments/

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