/ Blog / Five Ways 45Drives Support Can Help Manage Your Storage Infrastructure

Five Ways 45Drives Support Can Help Manage Your Storage Infrastructure

2021-07-26

We strive to develop the hardware you need and offer the services you require to do what you do best — keep everything running smoothly within your company.

If you’re a system administrator, we get it, a good day is when no one talks to you, and a bad day is when everyone talks to you. Well, our support team is 100% dedicated to making sure no one talks to you – unless you want them to, of course!

How do we do that? We’ve compiled five ways our service and support offerings can help you not worry about your infrastructure and backend surprises – but focus on your everyday tasks and keep your workflow moving forward seamlessly.

  1. Our Customers are #1

Everyone has heard that line in one form or another from a company they’ve done business with. And hopefully, those same companies truly conduct themselves that way. For us here at 45Drives? It’s a core, fundamental principle of how we operate. 

When you make that first call or email to one of our Account Managers, your relationship with 45Drives begins. We take the time to truly understand your needs and help guide you into making the best purchase decision for your needs. Once that purchase is made, you’re placed into the capable hands of our support team to get your hardware up and running.

With every email, every call, and every remote session, our team is dedicated to ensuring your storage infrastructure is up and running, working smoothly, and easily repaired if an issue arises. You’re not just a name or a number to us – you’re also part of our family. So much that we tend to have long withstanding relationships with many of our customers that span more than just support communication; we get to know about families, sports team preferences, funny office stories, etc.

  • No Nonsense

What you see is what you get with 45Drives. We’re not in the business of selling you hardware & software that you won’t use.

All of our pricing is transparent and significantly lower than many of our traditional competitors. Not just at the beginning of the purchase of your unit(s), but also when it comes to supporting them too. We don’t inflate our storage servers with bloatware, needless updates requiring specialized training (that many legacy vendors charge for), or special tools to pry them open to do something as simple as possible swap out a hard drive.

It’s your storage infrastructure. We fully believe that you should have the freedom to customize whatever you choose—with as little or as much 45Drives intervention as you want.  

  • Personalized Training

Although we have some general “out of the box” solutions, both on the product side and on the support package side, we are more than happy to tailor a support/training plan that will work for your needs.

You can purchase prepaid bundles of two, five, and 10-hour blocks for a set price, or you can tack on an hour here and there if you run into any problems. These support blocks include items like hardware diagnostics, RAID and Volume Optimisation & Support, Network Support, Data Migrations, and more.

Response time is within a 3-business hour timeframe by one of our friendly service team staff members. We also supply 24/7 hardware support and can even fully remotely manage your entire data storage infrastructure if that’s something you’re interested in too.

We live and breathe open source technology, and we love sharing that knowledge with our customers.

  • To-the-minute Time Tracking

To-the-minute tracking is unique to 45Drives. We track our support requests down to the exact minute. Unlike other providers, who implement dynamic fees for their support services, it could be two hours or six. Often, you don’t even know until your system is fixed—instead, you’re just given a bill to pay for the time spent to fix it without any context at all.

With 45Drives, on the other hand, we record our support tickets down to the minute. So, for example, if you’ve purchased a two-hour support bundle with your cluster, and you require assistance using those two hours? Whether it’s a phone call or an email—if it takes our team exactly 19 minutes to fix the issue you’re experiencing? You still have 1 hour, 41 minutes remaining support time with us to use as needed.

We do not round our support & service hour time up to the nearest half-hour/hour!

  • We Built Our UI: Houston

We built a UI for our customers- it’s called the Houston Command Center.

I must say I love yours and the rest of the team’s goal with Houston of allowing more seamless configuration through the GUI or command line, as someone who started as a Windows admin that was one thing I did really enjoy about Windows and missed when I started administrating Linux more. Keep up the amazing work over there and I cant wait to see what you guys come up with next.

Houston is powered by the Cockpit Project and has been truly designed with our customers in mind. The Houston Command Center gives you a single viewpoint into your storage infrastructure without becoming a cluttered dashboard. You can see things like CPU, memory usage, hardware information, and package updates.

One of its coolest features? The interactive motherboard!  

This interactive motherboard allows you to check your system’s specifications by simply hovering over the part you want to identify. In addition, it’s responsive, which means regardless of your configuration or if you want to swap out parts, it will provide a true-to-life representation of your hardware. Which makes it incredibly helpful, especially for diagnostic purposes when the 45Drives team needs to assist you; they can easily find items like drive slot ID, serial number, hard drive size, etc.

Moreover, you can easily and effectively manage your storage pools with Houston. Create pools, SMB/NFS shares, and manage snapshots—all without having to enter the command line. But, if you want to use it or need additional functionality beyond Houston’s default capabilities, there is a purpose-built CLI.

Conclusion

We fully back everything we sell from start to finish. No matter if you just purchased from us last month, or you’re still running one of the first generation Storinators. We do this so you can focus on yours and, what’s most important – keeping your infrastructure moving seamlessly.  

Thank you, Bailey, and everyone else that has spent time helping us get through these hurdles.  I can’t put into words how grateful we are to have such an awesome support team at 45Drives! You stand in that top 1% of vendors who make us feel like you are truly here for us!

We designed our servers to withstand years of everyday use. So, like the open source community that we know so well, nothing about our hardware proprietary – so you never have to worry about breaking the warranty by performing upgrades or modifications.  

If you’re thinking about changing your storage infrastructure, or want to add to your existing set-up, quote with us today. We would love to hear from you and have the chance to show you why over 20,000 customers have chosen 45Drives for their data storage needs. Contact us here.

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