Why did you decide to develop your SimplStor product?
Our customers convinced us there was an opportunity for a simple, reliable storage solution. The recession has been hard on everyone's budget, and a number of our customers asked if we had a less expensive solution than our off-lease NetApp systems. Clients who were building out very large, secondary storage pools also told us they simply couldn't afford the large array vendors' hardware, and more important, the software and support costs. For more than 8 months we gathered input from clients, brought their suggestions to our engineering staff, and reaffirmed with our customers that we understood their opinions on what was important. Then it was time to check with the customers to see what they would pay for the product. We found that the sweet spot for this storage solution was between $.50 and $.75/GB with raw capacity of 24TB to 100TB.
Once we had all the data, our engineers went to work to design a reliable product that would give customers the alert and monitoring notifications they were accustomed to receiving from the big array companies. We built a number of prototype units for customers to test, evaluate and improve to better align our storage solution to their requirements. At every step we learned something new, which we passed back to our customers for opinions and feedback. We think our solution meets the needs of many customers for low-cost storage while providing the hardware support and life cycle they have come to expect from the big iron guys. By basing it on off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software, our customers can take advantage of the latest software and hardware improvements.
How are you providing support for SimplStor?
We've built our own auto alert and weekly monitoring system known as SimplSupport. SimplSupport sends an email alert to the customer's Storage Admin and our engineers whenever there is a problem. This allows us to provide the high availability service and support our customers have come to expect from our organization. In addition, it provides a weekly status report to assist in managing both the storage and the underlying software.
How are you marketing SimplStor?
Zerowait has several hundred customers around the world who trust us with their NetApp service and support. Since we had a representative sample of them help us design SimplStor, we knew our customer base would be interested in the product if we could meet their requirements for price and performance. We are rolling out to our existing customer base, knowing that most of our business is a result of reference and referral, and this is the crux of our marketing campaign. We understand this product is not for everyone and will not fit every application, but we believe that if you are looking for a high density, reliable and affordable solution for your secondary and tertiary data storage, we have a viable alternative to the high-priced arrays that many companies keep their secondary storage on.
How are you selling SimplStor?
Given the cost restraints necessary to meet our customers' target price, we are selling it as a direct only solution from Zerowait. As a service company, we understand that customers don't like high pressure hucksterism. We don't play the game of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Each SimplStor server is sold with a 30-day, money-back guarantee. We want our customers to know we stand behind our products.
Where do you see the SimplStor product line going in the next few years?
We don't know all of the applications that our customers will imagine fitting our platform. We are currently working on several special projects for customers that want to tweak one aspect of the hardware or another. By working closely with our customers and focusing on meeting their requirements, we are certain that we will end with extensions to the product line that meet other requirements while maintaining our price/support advantage.