Zerowait Corporation

Last week I was in Dallas, TX visiting with customers and I learned about the challenges faced by a company trying to deal with a combination of HIPAA, FIPS, and PCI compliance. Zerowait has a variety of scalable and affordable storage solutions and the performance of our storage is quite good. The issue is how to affordably comply with regulations that are not clearly written or understood on security. For a company stuck in the middle the only option is to find a solution that can address all three types of compliance and then figure out how to do it affordably.

Coincidentally, this morning in Wilmington, Delaware I was at a round table discussion with Senator Carper who is the chairman of the US Senate’s Homeland Security Committee and the issue came up in his remarks and I asked a couple of questions about the cost of compliance for the business community and the lack of clarity on the requirements. Cyber security is on everyone’s radar but the unintended consequences of the regulatory environment are not well understood. And the challenge for businesses is: Since the government regulation and rule making process is deliberately ponderously slow, how can a company’s engineers quickly stop a cyber attack while waiting to figure out how to comply with government regulations that have yet to be finalized?

During the meeting in Dallas we discussed file systems and archival retention policies, and how to apply encryption that would meet or exceed the government’s regulations without breaking the storage budget.  Our engineering manager had researched options and the customer’s engineers were also well-versed in the different issues concerning encryption and retention policies. Together we think we came up with an affordable solution which would address all of the regulations that must be complied with.

The biggest problem the customer is dealing with is regulatory uncertainty.  Without clarity the choices are limited to finding a solution that is adaptable to changing requirements and not locked into any one encryption solution. On our staff we have an Air Force Veteran who uses the phrase “no plan survives contact with the enemy”.  As we go into the future we need to make encryption decisions that are adaptable and agile enough to protect data, while meeting uncertain and changeable regulations.

 A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies, but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company, and that person complies, and if the attacker gets in, then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted.

Kevin Mitnick

Last week I was in Phoenix, AZ visiting with customers and I learned a lot about how the dynamics of video surveillance are changing and how our SimplStor products are becoming the solution of choice in this market segment.

One of our customers is looking for a solution for long term archiving of video data. The big storage OEMs are trying to convince them to use a cloud storage solution. Our customer noticed that in the cloud all storage is generic and is wondering why one OEM’s storage solution in the cloud is any better than any other. The customer recognizes that the big arrays are all filled by drives manufactured by Hitachi or Seagate in the OEM’s systems and since they are not using most of the features in cloud archival storage our customer is wondering why they should pay the cost delta for the tier one storage for archival storage in the cloud.

Another customer is looking at recording local video and wants an affordable month long video vault for their surveillance requirements. They have tried other vendor’s storage solutions and their needs don’t fit the big OEM’s standard solutions. Since SimplStor was designed to be adaptable to our customer’s requirements it is fairly easy to increase our memory or make small changes to meet our customers’ requirements.

Business in Phoenix is increasing for Zerowait SimplStor in Phoenix as customers are looking for adaptable and affordable storage solutions for their video requirements. Interestingly, we are also seeing an increase in this business niche in our Australian division. Outstanding support and an affordable quality storage solution seem to be a winning combination for customers around the globe.

Providing outstanding service and support to customers requires constant attention to detail. Zerowait’s staff is dedicated to our customers’ success and last week our engineering staff got complimented from a customer in Australia on the quality of our service and the dedication of our engineering staff to solving problems. Often our staff has to weigh the risks of a change against the advantages of the change for the customer and we do this based on past experience, and the benefits to the customer.

The technical expertise that our staff possesses was acquired by years of learning on the job, but it also requires a record keeping system that is flexible and adaptable to the changing requirements of our business. We built our own systems over the last two decades to manage our customer’s contracts, inventory, production, and engineering tickets. As our business has grown the databases and programming time have increased and now we are looking to add programmers to our staff to handle these critical aspects of our business. Our customers require our staff to be able to access their technical and contractual information with a few clicks of the keyboard or mouse. So we are looking for folks that can be part of our team which is dedicated to providing our customers perfect service. We want someone who can think outside the box, and yet create a bulletproof and adaptable program that provides Zerowait competitive advantages.

This week I traveled to Austin, TX to meet with a customer and I learned some interesting information on how they are managing their data explosion with new file systems and the issues they are running into. It was the first time I had run into BTRFS in a production environment. I have been watching the evolution of BTRFS for quite a while and I am very interested to see how it works in their environment. These folks are technologically savvy, and they recognize that they are accountable for making certain that their own customer’s service is not interrupted. They were confident of their systems and choice of their File System.

Everybody measures their own risk tolerance a little differently. At Zerowait everyone understands that we are accountable to each other and our customers. I remember in 2006 when we started to expand globally I was warned about the risks involved in global expansion. It seemed worth the risks to me. And yet, in order to provide perfect service to our customers we rely on proven technologies and file systems based on our engineering team’s recommendations. Are file systems more risky than international travel, or a custom built CRM system to Zerowait’s business continuance?

It is interesting how we all measure risk every day in the different aspects of our lives.

I returned from a trip to Sydney, Australia last week and it was great seeing all of our customers there. We held an event for the VFX group and it was well attended and  a lot or our customers and friends were there.  Laurence Jones put the event together and we got a picture with him and one of the guests in one of our T-shirts. Laurence got a picture of me also. We have a lot of customers in the VFX business niche in Sydney and  our business continues to grow in the  Australian VFX business, Science, and insurance business as customers in all sectors look for ways to get more value out of their enterprise  storage investments.

I also got to see an old customer and friend  from Wilmington, Delaware that has moved  to Newcastle, Australia. I had not seen Peter since 2003 and it was great catching up again. Peter worked with one of our largest NetApp customers when he was in Wilmington and one of our engineers used to work for him on many of his big network and storage  integration projects. The enterprise storage world is a small world but it is a global business for Zerowait.

Laurence also arranged a lunch with the ‘Power players of Sydney VFX” for us and we had a great conversation about storage issues and the similarities between the VFX business and the oil and gas exploration business in the use of storage. Everyone  is trying to figure out how to get more value out of their storage expenditures and these are some of the sharpest engineers I know.  Every time I go to Sydney I learn something from these folks. And we try to integrate their ideas into our service and hardware offerings.

Based on the suggestions from our customers in Australia our engineering and operations teams are working on upgrading some processes and hardware to help all of our NetApp and SimplStor customers.  It was a great trip, and I look forward to going back in a few months.

What would you do if you suddenly found an extra 30% in your IT storage budget? Would you invest in your staff, or additional equipment? Maybe you would do a bit of both. For some of our customers this is a problem that they are happily coming to terms with.

By using Zerowait for their NetApp legacy support our customers typically save over 30% compared with NetApp’s ongoing support costs. When times are hard companies look for more affordable solutions, and with Zerowait they find a high availability solution to out of control support costs. One of our new customers told me a couple of weeks ago that his management thought our support prices were too low, but after checking our references he found that their OEM’s prices were really way to high. That was a game changer in their thinking about their storage infrastructure and its costs.

Another customer of ours is in the market for additional NetApp storage, and they decided to get a quote for a filer with a transferable license. We sent them a quote and their NetApp representative said that transferable licenses did not exist. We sent the customer proof of transferability. That was a game changer for the customer, now he is wondering about the reliability of his NetApp representatives other promises.

When we introduced our SimplStor Product line a few years ago we decided that we would provide the best available hardware and service that we could at a very affordable price, and we made sure that each of our customers was happy with our product and service.  Our goal for SimplStor was the same as for our NetApp support,  provide a solution that made our customers happy. Over time our customers asked for improvements and options including SSD and FC which are now part of the product line. That was another game changer for our customers, now they have a storage vendor they can rely on to provide semi-custom storage solutions adaptable to their needs.

Competition in the marketplace ensures customers the best prices and products. Zerowait’s solutions create competition for NetApp, both in service and support and transferable licensed systems. SimplStor offers an even more affordable, highly reliable option for our customers. We can help you answer your questions on how to build a more cost effective IT solution this year, which will leave you with just one more. What are you going to do with all the extra money in your budget this year?

This week I traveled to Colorado and Southern California to visit some of our customers. It has been a busy week. The folks I visited in the Energy and Resources sector in the Denver area were busy and recently we have picked up a lot of business in this sector as their data storage grows and they need to find affordable ways to expand their NetApp storage. Tiering storage  and using our SimplStor products is one way to seriously cut their data storage acquisition and several of our NetApp customers are looking at ways to use both  types of solutions in their architecture, several are using NetApp Filers for Tier one storage and using SimplStor for Tier two, archival and tape replacement strategies. This  seems to be a growth market for Zerowait’s products and services and an easy to implement solution for folks with massive data storage requirements.

The second leg of my trip was to the San Diego area to visit some of our financial, educational, and military customers. I really enjoyed each of the conversations I had and every one of them ran over time as we discussed strategies and storage economics. Our engineering staff is going to be having quite a few technical conference calls over the next few weeks  to discuss strategies, speeds and feeds.

At each of the clients I visited I heard about how our engineering and support staff helps them quickly and makes their lives easier. Many of our customers want us to help them in other parts of their business and we listen and consider these suggestions. After all, our company got into the storage business based on our customers’ requests in the 90’s and we got into the NetApp support business in 2002 based on the requests of our customers. Our SimplStor products were developed with our customers to solve their requirements for affordable archival storage, and recently our clients have asked us develop the Solid State and FC versions of SimplStor.

One of our customers pointed out that the reason Zerowait is so attentive  to customer needs is that the President of the company is personally traveling around to see them. That is the partial answer, but over the years we have put together a great staff that understands that keeping customers happy is the best way to run a growing business.

I was having a discussion about our business the other day with a friend and customer in New Jersey. We talked about the big storage vendors and how they try to get back charges for what they term ‘catch up support’; that is, they expect you to pay the service fees from the last time the systems were under support to the current time.  This can run to several hundred thousand dollars for big storage system and really bothers customers. We joked, laughed, and wondered what kind of company thinks that aggravating customers is a good way to create customer loyalty.  But the reality is that these vendors believe that they have their customers trapped into their smokestack solutions, and in the information age this is no longer true.
Zerowait is in the enterprise storage support business, and we have customers around the globe that depend on our service and support expertise. We are known as experts in NetApp equipment, but we have our own SimplStor product line also. The internet and the information age it has spawned allow us to be a global company in the niche of 3rd party NetApp enterprise storage and support. This niche is populated by customers looking for optimum value, with many looking for an alternative to NetApp for their large data storage requirements that are not tier one, but still require enterprise level service and support.  These two markets both require personal relationships and outstanding technical support and the customers appreciate the honesty of a service contract that doesn’t penalize them for lapses in support. Our approach is to replace what is broken and cover the system; it seems to make sense to our customers around the globe.

The transition to an information economy is happening quickly, and businesses that are using the vertical integration of smokestack production models are going to have to adapt or they will slowly wither away. Hardware is a commodity, outstanding service and support depends on expertise and personal relationships. And those can’t be commoditized.

Folks often ask us about our road map and we try to make it as simple as possible. Our goal is long term hardware reliability through affordable enterprise-class service and support.  You don’t need a sextant, chronograph and compass to get from where you are to where you are going with Zerowait on your team. Our road map provides an expressway to your destination without the hassles and tolls of your typical vendor.

First, we provide our NetApp customers with a value conscious alternative to NetApp pricing and policies. Our off-lease systems allow our customers to add additional NetApp infrastructure (heads and storage) while staying within today’s reduced budgets. And our highly skilled engineering staff offers the best service and support available for NetApp equipment for as long as customers want to run their systems.

Second, we develop features and hardware for our SimplStor product line as they are requested by our customers to meet their needs. Our platform was designed to allow adaptability to meet our customers’ needs. Sometimes quite a few customers want the same thing and it becomes a standard product or service. In 2013 we are introducing our FC and SSD versions of SimplStor.

Providing customers with affordable and reliable long term service and support for their NetApp and SimplStor storage hardware is our goal. If that is your destination also, Zerowait can get you there with GPS precision guidance.

Last week I was visiting customers in Delaware. Some of them have been customers and friends for well over a decade. I met with folks from a university, a big colo provider, and a large computer services company. All three organizations have large storage infrastructures which include NetApp equipment and just about every other storage vendor.

One customer is building out their Wilmington data center and they were talking about how Zerowait helps them control their NetApp support and hardware costs. Another customer has a substantial NetApp infrastructure and will be working with Zerowait on adding a lot of storage over the next few months in their data centers. Zerowait is picking up more and more customers who are looking strategically at their storage investments and trying to get more value out of them. To an increasing number of members of the NetApp user community, Zerowait is the preferred answer to sky high NetApp support and upgrade costs.

A couple of our customers mentioned that there seems to be a dichotomy in NetApp between the Filers and the E series and they were unsure how the two lines complement each other. The systems don’t share an operating system and seem to have very different pricing and value propositions. Just like the E Series equipment that NetApp sells our SimplStor product line does not share the OnTap operating system, but SimplStor is an affordable, highly reliable platform that is flexible and gaining traction. Customers are interested in using our SimplStor for tape replacement and also are looking into FC applications for SimplStor. In 2012 we grew strongly in the Energy sector and the Film and VFX business.

When the conversations turned to Zerowait’s prospects and growth expectations for 2013 and beyond, I explained that we are building out our Texas location and also have adapted our business model to the Australian marketplace very successfully.  Zerowait is preparing for growth this year as more of NetApp’s customers embrace our solutions to provide them affordable additional storage and extended service cycles for their existing NetApp storage investments. Each of the customers I met with last week recognized that Zerowait fills a unique and growing market niche, and they all expect to do more business with us over the next few years.

It is always fun to catch up with old friends.

Last week I was visiting customers in Atlanta, GA and the surrounding area and we spoke of their biggest concerns for 2013. Not surprisingly, most of the folks were battling with budgetary uncertainty. The causes were varied, but the effects were the same, tighter cost controls on storage and staff shortages.

I met with two customers in the banking sector; both are understaffed and overwhelmed trying to meet regulatory documentation rules. The cost of compliance with Dodd Frank regulations is so high it has cut into their budgets for new storage equipment, so these customers are looking to extend the life of their NetApp equipment and put more units under our support. They are also looking at how they can use our SimplStor products to cut their costs for archival storage.

I also met with customers in the media business, and they are also looking for any way to stretch their budget dollars. Without funds for new infrastructure these companies are also looking to stretch the lifespan of their legacy infrastructures. Extending the service cycles of storage infrastructure is one way of reducing costs that is being embraced by corporate America as GDP Growth rates slow and inflation increases.

Surprisingly, the Department of Defense is one area where there has been little attention paid to extending the life cycles of IT storage equipment.  You might think that an organization that can keep a 50 year old B52 as a front line bomber would understand how to extend the service cycles of equipment.  And yet service and replacement cycle for the DoD’s critical data storage equipment still seems to be dictated by the OEM’s of the equipment.  Maybe Sequestration will bring some sense to DoD procurement cycles. As a taxpayer I hope it does.