Maintain or Rip and Replace?

Maintain or Rip and Replace? Maintenance renewals - Is your clustered enterprise media storage platform with blue shiny lights coming to end of its 3-year support contract?

Typically many IT companies sell storage solutions (and for legal purposes not mentioning any names here) with 3 years support as part of the initial deal.

Sounds good: they sell on the pretext no nasty surprise support demands for year 2 and year 3. But when year 4 arrives, (and how quickly this comes around!) then the cost of the maintenance renewal is so high that it is often more cost effective to renew the technology. Some say this is a cynical ploy by the existing suppliers to force you to refresh your technology. I couldn't possibly comment. No really I can't, been told not to by the suits.

Replacing your current setup with new hardware should provide improved speed and reliability, so it's generally a good idea to include a refresh in your IT strategy. When that time does come around, it is a great opportunity to take a look in the market to see if there are other technology solutions that may provide a better fit for your needs. It also might actually be cheaper and less risky to seek out an alternative, like MatrixStore from Object Matrix:-

Object Matrix approach is not to force an upgrade at the end of 3 years. We typically support for 5 years and once hardware reaches End of Life in terms of support, then there is seamless migration to new hardware. Software can continue to be supported. But you have an option to sweat out your hardware.

Object Matrix is hardware agnostic and takes advantage of the latest and greatest in terms of storage technology - we started with 12TB nodes 5 years ago, we now have 96TB nodes in the same footprint. You can mix and match nodes over time and decommission nodes as an automated process once they become End of Life. Any content on the old nodes will be migrated and automatically rebalanced (migration in place for improved security and performance) through the cluster.

Software support is typically 10% per annum no matter how old the hardware. Hardware support is also available or alternatively we can supply spares and do the support yourself if so desired. All hardware is enterprise quality but is commodity, off the shelf.

Cost? - Well you may be surprised at the cost of our enterprise storage platforms that are trusted by the like of British Telecom, ProSeiben, Deutsche Bank and France TV. From a business benefit point of view it concurrently supports many different workflows from the same cluster. Ingest, transcoding, MAMs, PAMs, DAMs and distribution, all natively supported allowing you to consolidate many disparate storage silos into one, cost effective, nearline storage hub.

MatrixStore has been designed to be easy to use and administer. It has been designed to easily add storage over time and scale to petabytes and beyond. It is designed to self-heal in the event of any hardware failure without loss of content. Though we start as low as 24TB we currently offer 1 Petabyte for £250k or 500TB for £175k, both packages including support and spares - see www.matrixstore.net/petabyte. Our support is exemplary, just ask our customers.

So if you are looking at a technology refresh forced by an eye watering support renewal, please contact us for a demo and presentation of our solutions. We would welcome the opportunity to show you why many of the global broadcasters and large post production houses are employing a MatrixStore solution. And why MatrixStore is the digital preservation platform of choice.

LINK:	http://www.matrixstore.net/2014/01/30/maintain-or-rip-and-replace/...
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