Today Nexsan introduced its most advanced storage family yet – the revolutionary NEXSAN E-Series. We will get into the feeds and speeds in Part 2 of this blog post, but first I think it would be useful to explain the strategic thinking behind the new family.
We have watched with a mixture of amusement and incredulity as the “big iron” vendors try to reposition their high-end offerings as being optimized for the mid-market, while at the same time the commodity vendors in the market are saying that because they have more “tick boxes” than before, that they should be seen as serious competition in the midsize storage arena. Either way, the fundamental error is the same. The mid-market has its own set of challenges, and the only way to address them is from day one of the engineering project, focus like a laser on what the mid-market really needs.
Nexsan has been focused on the mid-market for over a decade, and we have observed how much pain these folks have encountered when trying to adapt their business to the costs and complexities of a high-touch enterprise storage solution, or dealing with the blind panic resulting from reliance on the “black hole” tech support one encounters with products from commodity vendors.
A mid-market customer cannot often afford to add storage specialists to their IT department and also send them to weeks-long vendor training, nor can they afford the armies of Professional Services consultants that are often recommended by the Enterprise vendors as an alternative. Especially when you consider that these vendors usually want a huge annual spend on maintenance and of course a forklift upgrade after Year 2.
A well-crafted storage solution for the mid-market must be designed around an IT department that has few if any dedicated storage managers, and thus must have an installation and management process that’s virtually free of arcane industry jargon. With shrinking budgets these days, it’s entirely possible that the IT Manager will be racking the gear himself (or herself) as well as configuring it and perhaps even maintaining it (to avoid the annual tithe to the vendor). Creating a storage product that fits these needs cannot be a simple afterthought.
In the next installment of this blog post I’ll tell you about the new products we are announcing today, and why we think they will set the new standard for mid-market storage.
