SATA Storage by Nexsan. SATA Storage by Whom?
At RADirect, we often encounter instances where our solutions are in direct competition with ones from the ‘big players’. You know, the huge corporations frequently known by 2-3 letter acronyms with big branding, marketing and sales muscle.....
This often presents a challenge, as many customers are risk averse; I think this is a natural course of human nature. We are uncomfortable detaching ourselves from our respective comfort zones and feel more secure when we follow the herd…and are willing to pay a major premium for that.
Nevertheless, innovation and progress rarely come from followers; rather, they come from individuals who have vision, passion, and the courage to go outside their comfort zone and follow their instincts and beliefs. Those are the people that will show you how you can accomplish an objective rather than tell you why a certain objective can not be reached. Those are the individuals that grab the ‘opportunities’ rather than focus on ‘limitations’… those are the individuals that drive progress and change.
Last Thursday, I visited one of our clients who happens to be just this kind of individual. Mike Parks is the CTO of DataPipe, one of the fastest growing providers of managed hosted services with a global reach.
Our relationship with DataPipe began about a year ago, and it was slow going initially. The company’s storage infrastructure was predominantly NetApp and HP, and getting the opportunity to present Nexsan’s SATA storage systems was not an easy task, even though Nexsan’s price advantage was significant. We knew we had a shot, but needed to wait for the time to be right.
This right opportunity arrived last September, when through the insight of Mike Parks, DataPipe re-engaged us with a backup/DR application for one of their clients.
The main driver for this renewed engagement was our ability to provide a cost effective, enterprise class SATA storage system with RAID 6 capabilities - at roughly half the price of a comparable RAID system offered by another manufacturer (who shall remain nameless).
Another important attribute was the simplicity of our solution. Our solution is seen by the OS (any OS for that matter!) as just a huge disk (yes, RAID 5 or RAID 6 enabled, dual power, dual FC controllers, hot swappable, and everything you would expect from an enterprise class SATA storage system).
So Mike gave our technology a shot – we sold DataPipe their first Nexsan SATABeast system late in 2006, and since then, our business with DataPipe has thrived.
In our last meeting, Mike told me that he is still astonished that since deploying the SATABeast, he has not experienced a single drive failure or any downtime whatsoever. And the performance is excellent (in Mike’s own words)!
Beyond the obvious impact this has on our own business, I take personal pride whenever we see such success stories.
If you, like Mike, are that person with a clear vision and a good understanding of what you want to accomplish, and appreciate the possibilities technology has to offer you, I’d like to use this opportunity and express my personal ‘kudos to you!’. Innovation and progress could not occur without you.