I talk to a fair number of customers and have difficulties sometimes remembering who's who. It tends to make every day an adventure. Anyway, I checked out the latest case study to appear on our corporate site and sure enough, it was Chris Formes - a customer I've communicated with via email and the telephone a few times. I knew we were going to publish this case study with Brookfield Homes, but I didn't put 2 and 2 together and think - Hey That's Going to be Chris!
The other thing that gave me a small surprise was that Chris was also using Mimosa's Nearpoint product for Microsoft Exchange archiving. Its great to see the Mimosa part of the story too. Years before joining EqualLogic, I set up meetings between EqualLogic and Mimosa to initiate a solution-relationship because there is a terrific synergy there. I'm always happy to hear when a customer is using both of our products.
Chris is doing a number of smart things to get the most out of Brookfield's storage budget. First, he's using Mimosa's software to reduce the amount of Exchange data on his iSCSI SAN. Second, he's using thin provisioning on our systems so he can pay as he grows and not over commit on storage resources that he doesn't need yet. Smart. We probably didn't sell Chris as much storage capacity as we would have a year ago, but its smarter storage than it was a year ago and that makes us all smile.
Our channel partner working with us at Brookfield is VL Systems in Irvine, CA. I'm looking forward to meeting Lee Green from VL Systems in the next couple weeks so I can get a complete picture of how the solution came together. Thanks Lee for your help in making all this come together!
