From our beginnings as a developer of software programs for high availability inventory applications, Zerowait has focused on meeting our customers' changing needs. Increased usage of the Internet for the transmission of inventory data and status reports required our customers to deploy large Web server farms to handle the load, and this led us to explore the specialty area of load-balancing and traffic management. By 1999, we became an OEM for Arrowpoint, a major player in the switch-based, load-balancing arena. Arrowpoint was soon after purchased by Cisco, making load-balancing ubiquitous, so Zerowait adapted, concentrating on related areas of business including caching, data storage and backup.

We then partnered with NetApp®, who were gaining a reputation for excellence in highly reliable storage. We became a NetApp Platinum level reseller, and then one of the first NetApp Registered Service Providers. As the Dot Com boom imploded, Zerowait changed its course once again. By late 2002, as NetApp's service and support costs skyrocketed, we found our niche in third-party support. We worked with our NetApp customers to develop a comprehensive third party support solution that provided them a Next Business Day (NBD) advanced parts replacement solution along with Incidental Technical Services (ITS) to assist with configurations, migrations, and other complex tasks. We then expanded into recycled/refurbished hardware sales and worked with leasing companies to help them remarket their NetApp equipment inventory with transferable licenses.

In 2008 we began to hear from customers that they needed a new archive solution. Our customers told us that off-lease NetApp systems were too expensive for petabyte size requirements, especially given the faltering economy. They were tired of paying for expensive software support and vastly inflated prices for what they could see was a collection of off the shelf hardware, but they wanted Tier One support – on board diagnostics that would report an error when it occurred, along with the information necessary to correct it.

It was clear SimplStor would have to be dense, energy efficient, and RAID based while offering a solid platform designed for easy replacement of failed components to keep support costs down. We quickly settled on Linux for our O/S – it offered high acceptance in the user community, along with formal support when required as provided by Red Hat® – all with no licensing fees. Our engineers specified a collection of off the shelf hardware that met our requirements while keeping prices in line; they also created a suite of utilities to monitor the system and notify the admin and our support team in the event of a failure, as well as provide a weekly update of system status.

Today, after 9 years in the marketplace, Hundreds of Petabytes of SimplStor can be found in Computer Animation, Engineering, Oil and Gas, Disk Drive manufacturing, Power Tool manufacturing, and many other environments, and our customers have continued to tell us what they would like to see, including Single Name Space and more Big Data focus.

To provide these tools, in 2013 we partnered with Red Hat to offer both their Red Hat Enterprise Linux product line and the Red Hat Storage Products, both Gluster and CEPH. From Department servers to Massive Big Data Archives, we offer turnkey solutions with one point of support – Zerowait. Our partnership with Red Hat means we can offer you access to our engineers with all their storage experience whether you have hardware or software issues, with the Red Hat team behind us for software updates, patches and security – truly tier one support at archive prices! We welcome your comments and suggestions, and thank you for your interest in SimplStor.