Zerowait Corporation

I was in Australia and New Zealand for the last couple of weeks and I had a great time visiting our customers in the region with our new APAC Engineer Kim Pearce. Like so many of our employees, Kim met us as a customer, one thing led to another and we decided that it would be good for everyone if he joined our team of engineers supporting  legacy NetApp equipment and our SimplStor installations around the world. Kim spent most of the month of July at our Delaware facility learning our operational procedures.

Kim has vast experience in storage in the VFX business, one of the global markets where Zerowait has a large and growing customer base, because the VFX business needs a lot of affordable and reliable storage. VFX is one of those business niches where our business has grown based on the referrals of our customers and the reputation of our company. This is especially true for our growth in the APAC region.  One of our Australian VFX customers asked us to open an office in Sydney at the end of 2010, and  we opened in January of 2011. In the 2 ½ years since then we have built a sizable business, and based on that growth we needed to add to our engineering team to help our customers maintain their storage infrastructures. Providing great service to our customers helps us continue to grow; as one customer tells another our business continues to prosper.

So if you call our engineering support line and hear an Australian accent, that will be Kim. If you are an engineer in the VFX business, you probably already know or have heard of him, and if you are in another business sector you can be certain that Kim will be able to provide you with the expert support you need for your critical storage infrastructure. After all, for over 22 years our company has grown globally by providing our customers honest and dependable service and support to help them meet their business goals and sleep soundly at night.

When you buy a socket set or additional sockets, whether you have a ¼, ½  or ¾ drive ratchet you can use your Snap On, Craftsman, or Kobalt sockets and ratchets  interchangeably. Some of my friends really like Snap On tools, but no matter which brand you buy it will still work with the other brands’ components. The manufacturers have feature sets that differentiate the tools, but they all work together; it makes it easier for everyone to stick to a standard and to differentiate themselves based on their quality, features, or price. The market segments itself without a proprietary ratchet drive, and a 25 year old ratchet works with a brand new socket to let you tighten the manifold on your Ford car or Caterpillar tractor.

So how is that like storage? Well, open source storage is by its very nature and DNA going to be well documented, allow interchangeability and be supported for the strategic long term, and this has the proprietary storage vendors shaking in their boots. When storage innovators like Doug Cutting, Hadoop’s creator, says things like this it substantiates that the move to mainstream open source storage is coming down the road.

By Nick Heath | June 14, 2013
“The days of businesses relying on locked-down operating systems and platforms tightly controlled by commercial organizations are numbered, according to Hadoop creator Doug Cutting.
Proprietary software platforms put businesses at the mercy of the platform vendor, often locking them into accepting regular price hikes, Cutting told ZDNet.”
“I don’t think people are going to want a platform technology to be proprietary ever again. I think we moved past that. Linux might have been the first to make that point and I think we’re emphasizing that here [with Hadoop],” said Cutting, now chief architect at Hadoop software and services company Cloudera.
Cutting believes that what will kill business demand for proprietary platforms is the threat of lock-in, where a customer is dependent on a vendor for products and services such that they cannot switch to another vendor without suffering substantial costs. These costs often stem from a lack of interoperability between a platform or application a business is using and a competing product they want to switch to.”

Zerowait’s SimplStor platform is designed to be adaptable to the needs of users of big storage archives which today are in the range of 250 TB to 1 Petabyte.  SimplStor is a success because the benefits of open source clearly outweigh the risks of a vendor who holds all the keys getting acquired or going out of business.

“At higher levels there’s less risk of lock-in. You’re not locked into it in the same way, because all your business logic, all the applications are written in terms of the open source platform.”

Mr. Cutting is right, it may take a few years but only the most extreme storage systems in the future will have proprietary locked in architectures. SimplStor is a success because it complements proprietary systems as an archive and due to its flexibility it allows High End Storage systems to manage the top 20% of storage while it quietly grows and manages the 80% of storage that is unstructured and occasionally used.

By the way, I prefer Snap On tools because I like their warranty, and I just think their tools are of better quality and make repairs and projects easier. Their no-hassle tool replacement is a model for the Zerowait service and support model. An outstanding service and support partner makes life more enjoyable because you can spend time getting things done instead of talking to customer service and IVR systems.

You already know you are spending too much on proprietary systems and that only 20% – 30% of your data is tier one and may need the features of those systems – isn’t it time you looked at SimplStor for everything else?

Imagine if every memory since the beginning of the human race had been saved, how much storage would that take? To generations in the future it might seem that humanity had a sudden spark of collective memories since almost every piece of data is going to be stored for all time, and for all the future generations to research. According to the European Court there is not a “right to be forgotten”

“A ruling this morning from the European Court of Justice has said that Google does not have to delete personal data from its search index, in a case that could have huge ramifications for web privacy and the so-called ‘right to be forgotten.” From the article: EU Advocate General Niilo Jääskinen said ‘Google and other search engines are not subject to privacy requirements under current European data protection law. Search engine service providers are not responsible, on the basis of the Data Protection Directive, for personal data appearing on web pages they process,’ he said in his official ruling, published by the court. He went on to explain that based on current laws citizens do not have a right to be removed from search indexes within the framework of the Data Protection Directive. ‘The Directive does not establish a general “right to be forgotten.” Such a right cannot therefore be invoked against search engine service providers on the basis of the Directive,’ he said.

As a Data Storage company, this court decision signals growth in our sector and we are looking at ways to help our global customers  cope with the data storage explosion that is coming. If all data can be stored forever, there is going to have to be some standards emerging on how to keep and search the archaic data that all governments, companies and families will be keeping. Proprietary solutions, by their very nature, are not going to be the standards and so there are going to be an emerging set of LINUX and open source archiving tools and standards that everyone can use.

Encryption tools will also be standardized, and there will be digital lock smiths emerging that can open “data safes” of information. There are many unforeseen business opportunities that are going to emerge as data grows; history has a way of repeating itself and the data explosion will create completely new business sectors.

Today Zerowait’s main businesses are the independent support of NetApp equipment and the sales and service of our SimplStor line of open source archival storage.  As storage grows it will continue to commoditize and we are going to be adding tool sets to help our clients manage and mine their data and provide other services to them.

The European Court has ensured that data storage is going to grow even faster, that ‘Big Data’ will be everywhere, and Zerowait is positioned to help organizations handle the growth of storage without breaking their  budgets.

Last week I was in Phoenix and Tucson visiting some of our customers and trying to help them solve their storage issues. A subset of our customers has instituted video monitoring of their premises for a variety of reasons. Many of these folks start by pointing their cameras data at their NetApp Filers as a simple way of storing data, but as the data collection increases over time they find that using Filers as a video vault is expensive.

Over the last few months we have been working with an increasing number of clients to help them implement our SimplStor hardware as an affordable video vault solution. SimplStor provides an affordable solution for video archiving, and easily scales up as customer storage requirements grow, and so our customers are migrating their secondary data from their Filers to SimplStor, this allows their Filers to serve up VM’s and databases and other priority jobs without forcing them to upgrade to the latest and most expensive NetApp equipment.

As the economy continues to muddle through with a moribund 2% growth rate IT departments need to find ways to handle their data storage requirements on a budget. Zerowait has the expertise and experience to help customers maintain their legacy NetApp equipment and also assist them in their data migrations of secondary storage to lower cost mass storage solutions like SimplStor.

In many organizations Storage is growing but budgets are not. How are you going to provide your organization’s growing storage requirements without breaking your budget with equipment from the big OEM’s? Zerowait has the answer.

This week Zerowait received the Exporter of the Year award. It was a great event and it was an interesting evening meeting other award winners and listening to their business histories and stories. The common thread of the evening was that people can have a dream and build a business through hard work and dedication to providing their customers outstanding service and support. In Zerowat’s case the business has expanded internationally over the past two decades thanks to the support of our customers and our growing team of employees.

Zerowait’s team is working on several new initiatives this year to expand our product line to provide our growing customer list the service, support, and hardware solutions they need for their ever growing storage requirements. And as you can see from my recent posts there are customers for Zerowait equipment all over the world.

Our business is growing and in the next few weeks we will be crisscrossing the country visiting customers throughout the USA. The next big event we will be attending is the RedHat event in Boston. I hope to see you there.

If you are interested in the speech I gave at the awards banquet here is the link.

Another customer I met with wanted to build his Disaster Recovery solution with homogeneous equipment to what he has in their primary data center.  His NetApp salesman will not sell him legacy equipment as the salesman wants him to upgrade both facilities. To put it politely, that isn’t happening with this year’s already stretched IT budget. We discussed the needed speeds and feeds, capacity, and growth and came up with a rough idea that will allow our engineers to put together an affordable homogeneous long term solution that will scale with their growth.

Last week I was in New York City visiting with customers who are trying to figure out how to affordably manage their vast and growing data archives. They have tried a variety of solutions from start ups and established vendors but nothing seems to solve the problems of data storage and management in a way that they need to.  They use NetApp for their tier one storage and have a home built archival solution which is reliable and affordable, but not a great long term strategic storage solution.

Our customer likes the reliability of their NetApp equipment, but it is hard to justify the cost of support and license renewals. Zerowait can provide off lease NetApp filers to them with transferable licenses and additional storage for their filers to reduce their costs, and like so many of our  commercial customers they have to find a balance that provides them the NetApp licenses along with the storage from Zerowait that works for their Tier one storage.  Commercial customers are looking to trim any operational expenses they can while maintaining the reliability they need.

A lot of our customers have built secondary and tertiary storage solutions on their own, and I always enjoy conversations with customers that have done this to learn how they chose the combination of Operating systems, file systems, disk drive types, and a cornucopia of other choices that have to be made to create an affordable storage solution that is adaptable and supportable into the future. The issues of sparing, support, and patches typically become problematic as the months and years tick by. SimplStor came about because some of our NetApp support customers recognized that they needed an affordable archive alternative, but they recognized that they could not support the product for the 5 year term themselves. Out of that idea, a niche storage product was born and now it is an international success story.

Our New York customer is an innovator like many of our customers, and they have some great ideas on how to manage their storage issues. Balancing end user requirements with the limitations of networks and storage management can create some interesting one off solutions to problems. But looking into the future our customers realize that they need a partner that understands storage and networks and is looking for affordable ways to help them achieve their long term goals.  Does your organization have a storage strategy on how it is going to support its current infrastructure in three years? Or are you going to simply select the most expensive solution offered by your current supplier? Zerowait can help.