Hey, everyone, Ashley here with another Tuesday tech tip, and this week we're discussing servers.

Wait, you're probably thinking, don't we usually talk about servers? Yeah, we tend to in one form or another. Today, though, we're going broader. I'm talking about the advantages and the longevity of a 45Drives storage solution compared to those provided by legacy vendors.

It comes up all the time. How long does a 45Drives storage server last? How long before you need to refresh 45Drives hardware? I'll say this, a really long time.

You've probably heard us mention legacy vendors before when we say legacy vendors were referring to the big names in the storage industry. They've been around for many, many years and their storage systems have been deployed and used by countless organizations and individuals around the world. They're everywhere.

Legacy vendors also offer full support for their storage offerings, which is hugely advantageous. It gives you the peace of mind needed to ensure that your purchase decision is the right one. This often elevates and further solidifies trust in both the purchase and in the company. As the phrase often went, no one ever got fired for buying IBM.

In saying that, however, the price of legacy vendor solutions can really start to add up. Simply put, they tend to cost a lot of money. Everything in their systems is proprietary. There are surprise paywalls that generally are considered during the initial purchase, as well as additional fees that tend to creep up. These unexpected line items can really cripple an organization. Usually, legacy vendors will load a lot of unnecessary features into a solution and charge way more for them than what's actually required if you need to replace a component inside of your storage infrastructure.

Guess what? You not only need to pay for the maintenance fees to swap it out, but you're also paying whatever price at that time for that particular component. On top of that legacy, vendors want you to replace your hardware frequently. You've heard of the term planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence, right? Quickly, If you haven't, it's when a product is planned or created to have a limited life. Essentially, it's designed to become obsolete after a predetermined amount of time, the performance of the product or hardware starts to deteriorate, or sometimes it stops working completely, which of course means every few years you have to buy more components and parts because the ones in the systems from a legacy vendor don't perform as well as they used to or they completely stopped performing completely.

Remember when I said no one ever got fired for buying an IBM? The truth is, as we've learned from discussions with our customers, that lots of people actually get fired for buying overly inflated, needlessly populated storage systems.

At 45Drives, our products are built to last - as long as the performance you bought and specified continues to keep you happy. And if it doesn't, if you find your needs are changing, that's great. If you want to change things up, our units use all screws. There are no rivets. There are no complex pieces that require specialized tools or technology to disassemble them. Want to put in a wider motherboard a larger CPU changer to drive? It's no problem.

You can easily do that with a 45Drives storage server. Simply make the changes that you want to improve your unit as technology advances without voiding your warranty. Obviously I would love to sit here and tell you that we want you to refresh your storage unit every few years. I mean, that's just more money for us, isn't it? But we don't want you to do that, at least not when it isn't needed. We're not in the business of charging you for items that aren't necessary with a 45Drives storage unit. You don't have to buy new hardware every few years. We're not going to try and sell you something just because you think you might need it.

Our systems are built to last and they're designed to allow for changes as you need them. Plus, there's absolutely nothing proprietary about a 45Drives storage server. The components inside them, their enterprise grade, an excellent quality grade, but they're also off the shelf. You can purchase them from anywhere you choose at the price you're comfortable paying for them

And support. What about support? We offer a full range of support services here at 45Drives everything from training to general configuration and troubleshooting questions, through to fully, remotely managing clusters from our location. Reach out to us today. If you're tired of being locked in by your current vendor, we'll give you a full walkthrough of any one of our units and answer any questions you might have. Just like the open source model, we're fully transparent about everything we do. Thanks for watching and join us again next week for another Tuesday.