Zerowait Corporation

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.

Last week I met with a number of our customers in the Boston area and the issues they were dealing with illustrate the problems that many storage administrators have – tight budgets, limited storage capacity for anticipated storage growth and limited staff.

I met with the team at one of our oldest customers and they are trying to stretch their budget to handle requirements for onsite production and offsite storage. Their FAS3050’s are running fine and still have capacity to handle more storage. There is no budget to upgrade these FAS3050’s as NetApp would like them to do so they are going to keep these high reliability heads running for as long as possible with Zerowait supporting them with parts and service. Additionally, they have been using our SimplStor units for a few years now and find they are an affordable and reliable way to archive, so they are going to use an additional SimplStor as an offsite remote tape replacement.

Another customer I met with has a large user who has recently purchased a large Linux Cluster with projections that it will double its storage requirements in 2013. Additionally, the nature of the modeling requires a lot of writes which slows down the NetApp infrastructure to handle the concurrent demands of VMware and Oracle for their business requirements.  During our discussion of options for the big Linux cluster the customer asked if we could build our SimplStor with Solid State Drives. He prefers to work with a company he knows that has been providing service and support for over two decades as opposed to some VC backed Startup Company with no history at all.  I told the customer about our new SSD version of SimplStor and how we are carefully rolling it out to select customers to make certain that each unit works flawlessly in their datacenters. Over the holidays our engineers will be working with the customer looking at his logs and discussing his system usage to come up with the best solution.  As a service and support business our engineers are encouraged to spend the time to help the customer understand the nature of his bottlenecks and find the best solutions.

Another Boston customer is in the midst of a corporation wide shift in their data system architecture and needs help moving their petabytes of data to different locations. This is a big job and they want us to help them by providing storage resources and engineers to assist at the various sites.There is storage strategy, logistics, security, and technical expertise needed for this job and our customer knows he can depend on our engineering staff to help them make this big project go as smoothly as possible.

2012 is ending a lot like it began for Zerowait; helping our customers find affordable solutions to their biggest data storage problems. Zerowait has grown in 2012 and we expect to grow again in 2013, and based on the quotes we have out I think we are going to have a very busy first quarter.

Thank you all for a great year!

Applying Storage Technology used in Movie, VFX, and Oil and Gas Exploration Applications to Win Races. Hendrick Motorsports Relies on Zerowait SimplStor for High Availability Data Access.

Wilmington, DE (PRWEB) December 12, 2012
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/12/prweb10180779.htm

Who wins the race is often decided by hundredths of a second. Great racing teams are dedicated to finding those hundredths in every part in their performance. With all the information recorded at both the race and during development, Hendrick Motorsports understands that data availability needs to be fast and uninterrupted. Zerowait’s storage technology, solutions and support provide them the edge they need to keep winning.

Finding the Elusive Second
Along with all of the performance data gathered by Hendrick Motorsports engineers, they record many aspects of race events to review while searching for ways to improve their track performance. When the team decided that it needed a storage solution for its HD video archives, they knew that Zerowait was working with the leading international companies in the Film and VFX business. Chris Newsome, Operations Manager at Hendrick Motorsports, says, “We’ve been working with Zerowait for the better part of a decade. Their team has relationships in the VFX business, and we knew they understood the required storage technology better than anyone. Zerowait provided us a turnkey, affordable storage solution to handle our fast-growing requirements.”
Matt Cochran, IT Manager at Hendrick Motorsports, added, “Zerowait’s SimplStor is easy to expand and has the performance we need. It allows us to increase performance by simply adding additional memory and NIC (Network Interface) Cards for bandwidth. The engineering team at Zerowait has always been available to help us with our NetApp equipment, and we recognized that with SimplStor Zerowait had put together the winning solution for our High Definition Video archive.”

Designed by Customers
SimplStor was developed based on conversations with large database users, including the Movie, VFX, and Oil and Gas companies who helped Zerowait design the equipment to meet their needs for a dense, affordable and scalable solution with outstanding performance. Offering 68TB in a 4U server and 90TB in a 4U add-on module, SimplStor offers a petabyte of storage in a single rack. When Hendrick Motorsports started to produce their own High Definition Video, they knew they could trust Zerowait for the storage solution they needed while saving their budget for other improvements to their systems.

Backed by Trust
Mike Linett, Zerowait’s President, added, “The Hendrick Motorsports organization and Zerowait have a lot in common. Both are family owned, have grown from ideas into successful companies, and are dedicated to improving performance. We’re proud to be celebrating our 21st year of providing exceptional support and solutions to our customers through open and honest relationships dedicated to their success.”

ABOUT ZEROWAIT:
Headquartered in Wilmington, Del., USA, and with offices around the world, Zerowait is the worldwide leader in independent service and support of NetApp filers. Zerowait solutions include off-lease fully licensed NetApp systems and the new Zerowait SimplStor line of single-name space archive storage. Storage administrators throughout the world rely on Zerowait to provide affordable solutions to the skyrocketing costs of data storage. http://www.zerowait.com

ABOUT HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS:
Founded by Rick Hendrick in 1984, Hendrick Motorsports has earned more than 200 race victories and a record 10 car owner championships in NASCAR’s premier division, the Sprint Cup Series. The organization fields four full-time Chevrolet teams on the Sprint Cup circuit with drivers Kasey Kahne, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Headquartered in Concord, N.C., Hendrick Motorsports employs more than 500 people. For more information, please visit http://www.HendrickMotorsports.com or interact on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

I have met with a lot of customers over the past few years, and after hundreds of customer visits and thousands of phone calls and emails, I think I’ve learned what customers really want from storage. It should be: 1 – Easy to deploy.  2 – Affordable. 3 – Straight-forward to manage.  4 – Uncomplicated to expand.

Why is enterprise storage so hard to deploy and so difficult to migrate data to and from? A lot of storage issues are caused by patchwork networking and storage protocols that have grown over 20 years into a mix of open source and proprietary solutions. Politicians often say that making laws is like making sausage, and the same can be said for enterprise storage. There is no one ‘right’ answer for all storage as there are so many special requirements and applications. After thousands of conversations with storage engineers and managers I have come to the conclusion that storage is simple to define in the macro environment, but difficult to define in the small, user environment. Whereas the Big Boss views his storage issues as simple to understand, the storage admin experiences a kaleidoscope of complexity. This leads to problems, one of which is that the Big Boss is often confounded by the acquisition costs and ongoing maintenance and management costs of their tier one arrays.

When storage managers try to explain that storage costs can be managed by migrating less critical data and information to less expensive arrays, management gets interested. But who wants to admit that his division’s data is not as important as another division’s data? Of course every bit of every department’s information is mission critical. If it wasn’t, then perhaps their division could be considered not critical–and in today’s economy, who wants to admit to that? The next step in that train of thought is the unemployment line.  Ego and fear play into the cost of storage and therefore every department’s data is mission critical and on expensive tier one arrays.

We all seem to agree that storage should be easy to manage and that Human Nature creates an environment where every department and user thinks their data storage and network access is mission critical.  How, then, can you prioritize resources for users in network and storage environment where everyone wants and requires priority access? The only solution is to get ever faster switches, routers and storage—which, unfortunately in a lot of cases, are not compatible with the existing architecture. This leads to glitches and hold ups in deployment, more headaches for the admin, and the whole storage infrastructure turns into an unmanageable monster, much like Frankenstein—cobbled together from disparate parts.

Then there is expansion. Tier one storage should be easy and affordable to expand, but can’t be because of proprietary software and legacy hardware. Unfortunately, proprietary software and legacy hardware needs to be kept running: data migrations are difficult and costly, something most companies can ill-afford in today’s economy.

Human nature, technological change and proprietary products all conspire to make storage hard to manage and expensive to maintain. Our customers tell me that Zerowait support is the best available and saves them time and money when compared to OEM support. They also tell us that our SimplStor product provides them the flexibility they need at an affordable price point, if they want new equipment. Successful companies will need to master the details of their network and user requirements in an ever growing mesh of complexity.

Zerowait can  help you with this difficult task.