Zerowait Corporation

As 2013 nears an end, I have been reflecting on the things we tried and the successes we had over the course of the year. For example, in 2013 Zerowait tried to increase the proportion of total sales in the areas of international service and support business and SimplStor products. In reviewing our efforts, I can see how we accomplished our goals, but can also identify the many course corrections we made along the way. The path was not necessarily straight. Basically, I have found that there are 3 steps to success; and, while each is critical, success is never guaranteed. However, if you allow your team to count learning and adapting from failure as a part of the process, improvement is always possible.

Step 1 is Vision: Since we are in the service and support business, when I meet with clients I hear about their problems. I listen closely and try to identify ways that Zerowait can create a solution for them. In a typical year I visit between 100 and 200 customers at their locations, and because I travel so much I have time alone to think about possible solutions. The result is between 20 and 25 new ideas a year that I try to work into something definable. Once I have identified the core idea, I present it to our team for review. Most of the ideas won’t hold water after a few minutes discussion, but in a typical year about 5 new ideas will get turned into projects of one type or another. One of my friends considers this the law of 25%: About 25% of my conversations will yield an interesting business idea, about 25% of those ideas are worth a business analysis sheet (which I do), and about 25% of those analysis sheets will actually be turned into a project at Zerowait.

Step 2 is Execution: If you don’t execute then the ideas are just dreams. At Zerowait we create engineering projects to try things with defined completion dates, which often slip as we learn more information. What is interesting in researching new things is that often the course you are on can change as a new piece of information steers the project in a new direction. That new direction can create something wonderful, but there is a chance it’ll just be a waste. That is why communication is so important with projects. It is difficult to stay focused on the objective while being flexible enough to be able to change direction a bit to meet a new information or opportunity. As Zerowait doesn’t have unlimited financial or human resources, we have frequent reviews and are willing to pull the plug on a project if it is not yielding results of one type or another.

Step 3 is Course Correction: As we endeavor to create a new product or service I have frequent conversations with our customers to make certain we are staying on course with what they are looking for. Sometimes things work in ways that you don’t expect, or someone leaves their job and that causes the project to wither on the vine. Other times the “Hey – what if we did this?” conversation with customers will lead to Zerowait trying a new variation which turns into the final product, and that is very cool. Unfortunately, most projects we try do not yield a new product; they yield knowledge and often an incremental change in the way we do things to improve our customer service and support.

It is often very frustrating to watch what started out as a great idea struggle as we are unable to execute the idea and make it a success. Even in those cases, when we write up the report it is important to document what we learned so we can add that to our knowledge and experience and apply it to the next round of projects. For example, this year we built a special 2U SimplStor Controller for a specific market niche but the customer went another direction. A few months later another customer asked for a very similar product configuration because I had mentioned it during a meeting. A perfect example of how the first failure led to the second success, which looks like it will turn out to fit an even bigger market niche.

At Zerowait we will continue to try new things and find ways to help our customers. Trying out new ideas is always interesting and often frustrating, but in the end it certainly provides us with a wealth of experience and knowledge with which we continually improve our products and services. From SimplStor to the Exporter of the Year award, Zerowait has grown and prospered because we keep trying new things.

Founded in 1991, Zerowait is the largest third party service company providing NetApp (NTAP) support and the creator of the SimplStor product line of affordable big storage solutions.

Zerowait’s core business is its ZPA Zerowait Parts Assurance business which provides customers around the world with outstanding service and support for their legacy NetApp equipment, including its Exception Reporter systems monitoring. Zerowait supports NetApp storage infrastructure in the financial, energy, healthcare and media business sectors.

Background : NetApp is one of the largest data storage providers in the world and the release of their new OnTap 8.2 operating systems has forced many of their customers into a corner. They are now in the awkward position of having to upgrade to the new NetApp architecture or change their storage infrastructure. Whether a customer decides to upgrade or migrate away from NetApp, there is no winning as both options are expensive. Many large NetApp customers are deciding on a third option; the use of third party support to maintain their legacy NetApp equipment while they consider their options for data storage going forward.

Question: How does NetApp’s upgrade to OnTap 8.2 change things for NetApp’s customers?

Mike Linett: NetApp’s customers use a lot of older legacy NetApp Filers to store their secondary and tertiary data. OnTap 8.2 will not allow customers to snapmirror data to systems running older versions of OnTap, forcing them to upgrade to expensive newer systems. Customers are under a lot of budgetary pressure and NetApp is taking away their options. We have had several customers tell us that the upgrades are going to cost about $1 Million per PB, and they are looking for alternatives. As the only international independent service provider customers are contacting us from all over the world.

IT spending is under the budget microscope at many organizations and CFO’s and CIO’s are looking for every way they can to save money. $1 Million per PB for secondary and tertiary data just does not make sense to many organizations, and primary data is not growing as fast as archival data. We are helping customers bend the cost curve down substantially.

Question: What is the primary benefit of NetApp’s OnTap 8.2 OS ?

Mike Linett: From NetApp’s point of view 8.2 offers scale out for performance and capacity, but there are really very few companies in the world that need that level of scaling and the costs are very high. Our customers like the idea of scale out with 8.2 but are wondering why they can’t use their older systems any more. NetApp seems to have forgotten that customers need BOTH affordable and scalable data storage solutions, not EITHER affordable or scalable data storage solutions.

Question: How is NetApp positioned as open source storage solutions continue to take market share?

Mike Linett: NetApp’s software is feature rich, but the costs can make the biggest companies blush. NetApp has a high cost of goods, and an expensive support model. Quite frankly, the value add of NetApp is being challenged daily by open source alternatives that don’t have the high costs of acquisition, maintenance, and software support.

Our SimplStor Platform spans a number of markets from archiving through secondary storage solutions. With our Add on Kits our customers can add flash, solid state and a number of memory options and network options including SAN. We have found that one size does not fit all storage requirements, and so we offer SimplStor Add On kits to our customers who need to tune their storage to meet their unique needs.

Question: What is your forecast for 2014 and 2015?

Mike Linett: Corporate finance is paying a lot of attention to IT spending and in the bigger accounts we meet with the question is typically how can we help cut 30% or more out of their storage costs. When compared to NetApp for support we are typically 50% of their price and our SimplStor acquisition price is about $200K per PB compared to NetApp’s $1000K per PB. So the value add of NetApp is under a lot of pressure right now and for the next few years.

Question: Where does Zerowait go from here?

Mike Linett: Zerowait is adding Field Storage Managers to service our NetApp and SimplStor customers around the world, and our international growth over the last few years has been phenomenal. We expect our international and domestic commercial business to continue to grow as more customers need affordable, scalable storage options.

In addition, we are going to increase our concentration on the Federal space and are in the process of releasing a GSA schedule. The Federal government spends a lot of money on storage, and Zerowait can help them save our money. Storage is only going to grow, and Zerowait can help the government control the cost of that growth, just as we have been doing for the private sector.

Over the last month I have made numerous trips to the Houston, TX area to work with our Energy customers who have tremendous data and processing requirements. The folks that I have been meeting with are all concerned with the costs of storage acquisition, maintenance and migrations. In my conversations with them, I realized that dealing with NetApp was like playing a hand of Texas Holdem.

The game starts when the client decides to run his NetApp systems for 5 or more years but his NetApp team tells him that after 3 years he needs an upgrade even though his filers are not maxed out in storage capacity or IOPS. The customer wants to increase his ROI and the Salesman has to meet his sales quota and wants to increase his sales commissions. So the first cards are dealt; the customer has two down cards – budget and increased ROI, and the sales person deals out the next three face up cards – Software Licenses, End of Software Support, End of Life.

Over sips of Shiner beer, the savvy customer asks the salesman a question about how come some customers are able to use transferable licensed systems. The salesman bluffs about lack of license transferability on their systems.

The next card the customer receives is the Zerowait card. It gives the customer the comfort he needs because Zerowait has been providing the NetApp community with reliable service and support for over a decade, and SimplStor provides an affordable tier two storage environment. But a smart poker player wants a stronger hand.

Our customer and poker player has proof of license transferability and knows that Zerowait can support his NetApp equipment around the world and so he stays in and continues to grow the pot and finally calls the salesman.

The salesman has to admit that transferable licenses exist and that high availability equipment does not become low availability because a new model came out. The customer wins by reducing his costs of new equipment by showing the salesman that there is competition in the marketplace, and by leveraging Zerowait’s legacy support he reduces the number of new units he purchases.

That is how Zerowait’s savvy customers play poker with their NetApp sales team and win.

At Zerowait we do a tremendous amount of NetApp support and last week one of the members of our engineering team plotted the locations of our current support accounts in North America. As you can see, our customers are spread out across the country, with most located in what is often referred to as the “NFL Cities”. As Zerowait’s customer list has grown over the years we have had to do a lot of traveling to provide our customers with ever improving service and support. Recently Zerowait has been adding Field Storage Managers where we have the largest customer concentrations. Our FSM’s are storage engineers that help our customers’ improve their storage infrastructure efficiency by extending the life cycle of their current storage equipment or by helping our customers with our affordable NetApp upgrades and SimplStor storage products. Over the next year we will be adding more FSM’s to our team to help our customers deal with their ever growing data storage requirements.

While other storage vendors concentrate on unit sales, at Zerowait our focus is on service and support. There are options to the expensive forklift updates/upgrades offered by the Big Storage companies, and our focus on support has resulted in Zerowait customers across the USA and Canada that rely on our hardware, service, and support.

If you are looking for an affordable and reliable storage support solution I hope that you will give us a call so that we can add you to our map of satisfied customers.

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.