Zerowait Corporation

This week was pretty busy for Zerowait’s  European and American Sales teams.  We were all attending the SEG show  in Las Vegas and we were busy the whole time.  The Oil and Gas business represents a major portion of Zerowait’s Global business and the SEG show allows us a chance to catch up with our customers and friends from Europe, Australia, Asia and throughout North America.
 
Just about everyone we spoke to is trying to deal with managing expanding storage requirements and very tight budgets and our customers are embracing both our Legacy NetApp Support and also our SimplStor products.

During the trade show we also launched   a  Press Release with Dial America which is one of our  SimplStor customers in NJ. Dial America is not in the Oil and Gas business, but our customers at the show could relate to the issues of storage costs and capacity that our friends at Dial America are dealing with .

“Our old tape backup solution was painful to deal with because it was complex to reliably restore files and expensive to maintain” said Gerhard Lindenmayer, Information Security Officer at DialAmerica. “It would take hours to perform recoveries from tape – it was a 20th century solution for a 21st century company. Zerowait’s SimplStor disk archive provided an easy way to reduce cost and complexity while increasing backup and recovery performance.”

With data center space always at a premium, DialAmerica knows the storage density of Zerowait’s SimplStor (338TB raw in only 16U) will help them reduce their raised floor space and increase their operating efficiency. Thomas Conway, DialAmerica’s CIO says “Zerowait’s SimplStor provides us with cost efficient storage for our big data, and is backed by a company we have worked with for a decade”.

If you are looking for an affordable  storage  alternative to the high priced OEM solutions our SimplStor product line is worth a look. SimplStor is  being embraced by customers around the world for a variety of applications in Video FX business, Manufacturing businesses, Oil and Gas sector, and Hi Tech niche businesses.

It was great seeing our Oil and Gas  friends in Las Vegas, we are looking forward to next year’s SEG show in Houston.

Yesterday, Hurricane Sandy came through our area and I’m sure you’ve seen all the reports of damage. Fortunately, here in Wilmington, Delaware, while we experienced rain and heavy winds it wasn’t as bad. Our office Disaster Prevention preparations worked as planned to keep our staff safe, our customers satisfied, and provide for our business continuance.

The most important resource of Zerowait is our staff, and they need to remain safe and take care of their family and property. We recommend our staff take Personal Time Off during a weather emergency and concentrate on keeping their family safe. If there is an incidental business question, we can contact them by cell or email. That allows us to check on staff safety as well as provide our customers with the service they expect.

Making use of the Internet, our remote engineering and sales support teams allowed us to seamlessly move our support services and sales to other regions of the country. This allowed our local staff affected by the hurricane to concentrate on taking care of their families.  The staff that was in the office yesterday was able to prepare our facilities in case high water entered our building. We spent quite a few hours moving things around, and making sure that our equipment was safe. The system our team has built over the last decade harnesses the power of the internet to create a virtual environment for the Zerowait staff to provide for our customers, and quite a few were surprised to find we were working yesterday.

We’re back up and running this morning in our main location because the Zerowait team takes storm preparations seriously. We take notes after each weather event to improve our response to events as they occur.  The only way to improve is to learn from your past and study what others have done to avoid issues. We learned quite a few things from this storm, and we are reviewing our notes and adding a few new pages to our Disaster Prevention Manual.

There is always room for improvement, even at Zerowait  : ).

This week I traveled to the ICANN conference in Toronto http://toronto45.icann.org/  and also visited several of our customers in and around Toronto. The amount of construction going on in Toronto is incredible and the Ontario economy is doing very well according to the customers I visited. The ICANN events were interesting and it was great catching up with my friends and customers from around the world that were attending the conference. The folks I spoke to at ICANN are optimistic about the future growth opportunities that the new Top Level Domains will bring about, and it is good to talk to people who are enthusiastic about the opportunities that are unfolding in their business sectors. Coincidentally the Canadian press has an article today that points to the optimistic view of the Canadian business folks I met with this week:

“Canadian manufacturers are feeling optimistic about their futures as they foresee a sales shift over the next three years towards Europe and developing countries, according to a study released Thursday by their industry’s main association.

Sales within their home provinces, to the rest of Canada and to the United States will remain the dominant markets for Canadian goods, but most companies expect to expand their reach to other markets, according to the survey of 649 Canadian companies released by the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters association.

“Companies expect globalization pressures will propel a shift in where they do business,” the analysis conducted in August by a coalition of 52 industry associations found.”

All of the customers I met with have tremendous storage needs in multiple global locations, and they are looking for ways to cut costs on their data storage. Zerowait has provided many of them with NetApp storage support for many years, and they are also embracing our SimplStor products for their archiving and image/graphics storage requirements. 

Reacting to this globalization of our business niche, and the requests of our Australian customers for a local office, Zerowait opened our Australian office in 2011 and our business is thriving in Australia.  Over the next few years we expect our global business to grow to about 50% of Zerowait’s revenues. Working internationally has challenges, but our customers like that we help them control their enterprise storage costs around the world with our affordable storage support and hardware solutions.

The Oil and Gas industry has always been global, and has always required vast amounts of storage. During the first week in November, Farat Buta, our EU sales manager, will be traveling from the UK to the SEG show in Las Vegas to work with us in booth 107. Farat will be working with many of our international clients who will be there, helping them meet their storage growth objectives with our affordable storage products and services.

Finally, in November Zerowait will be celebrating its 21^st year in business. When I look back over the past 21 years and see what our team has accomplished and how we have built the company from my dream into an international company I am very impressed with our staff.  But more importantly, I am very optimistic about the next 21 years and I know that we can help our customers in new ways as technology improves and globalization increases.

NetApp customers are extremely loyal to the brand and they love the performance, scalability, and reliability that NetApp provides their user community. There are, however, two aspects of doing business with NetApp that annoy their customers, and those are the rapid supersession of models and the costs of service and support. But as many loyal NetApp customers have found out, combining NetApp hardware with Zerowait support provides them with an affordable high availability solution.

Zerowait has been working with NetApp Filers since 1998. We still are supporting legacy filers for organizations that were built in the ‘90’s. That is longevity! Many organizations struggling with the uncertain world economy take the approach “if it ain’t broke, don’t replace it.” And for those companies Zerowait’s affordable support provides a lifeline for their NetApp storage.

Over the last few weeks we have helped some of the best known organizations in Biotechnology, Video Effect (VFX), Media and hosting meet their growing storage requirements without busting their budgets. Like many of the IT organizations we work with, some of our new customers are in budget lockdown due to reduced quarterly earnings, and upgrading to the latest NetApp head is out of the question. But that doesn’t mean they can’t add more NetApp storage. They know that Zerowait provides storage upgrades and shelves to customers around the world, and our current specials make adding storage to their current reliable, scalable NetApp infrastructure easy and affordable.

In this economy, outstanding service and support has a value which can be measured by comparing the cost of new equipment and required data migration to the cost of adding to your current NetApp highly available and scalable storage infrastructure.  These bottom line costs savings can be measured by CFO’s and the folks in the executive suites, with no impact to the quality of service you now provide.

If you like your NetApp equipment, you will love Zerowait.

I was speaking to a customer last week who we had quoted and I was told that they were staying with NetApp for their support because NetApp met our price. The customer felt it was better to stay with the OEM for support, since the price was the same. I told the customer that although I was sorry that I did not get his business, I was happy that I was able to help them meet their budget needs by creating the competitive environment which incentivized their NetApp representative to meet our price point for service and support. The customer agreed that it was our competition that reduced their cost of support.

We work with customers all over the world, and many of our customers say that we provide better service and support than the OEM does for their own equipment.  Many customers keep their NetApp systems long enough that NetApp’s representatives will no longer provide support quotes for equipment and Zerowait is the only global company providing high availability support for these legacy systems.  We think that NetApp makes great hardware and software and we have been working with NetApp hardware since 1998. Over the last decade we became an independent service and support organization, and that transition has allowed us to provide a competitive business model to NetApp for the support of their equipment. Our customers include commercial organizations around the globe, and many state and federal agencies.

In a turbulent world and uncertain economy, many organizations are fighting with extremely tight IT budgets and looking for ways to save on their storage costs. Over the last month I have met with customers in TX, CO, NV, and AZ to discuss the many ways we can help them stretch their IT dollars, whether by extending the service life of their NetApp equipment or by using our SimplStor as an  affordable data archive or tape replacement solution. If you are looking for an affordable storage solution, Zerowait has the answer!

Last weekend I went to the Reno Air Races and met a few friends and customers who are interested in this niche of racing.  It was great weekend of air racing and Strega won the unlimited category.  Strega is the white plane going by in the video .

Strega has been dominating the niche of unlimited air racing for a few years, and their team deserves a lot of credit for the dedication they put into keeping the aircraft competitive. After all, there is not a lot of money to be won and Unlimited Air Racing has a very small following.

This is where the Strega team and Zerowait have a little in common. Outstanding service and support for storage networking equipment is also a niche market.The Zerowait team is dedicated to providing the absolutely best service and support that we possibly can to our customers. And our customers continue to tell us that we provide them the best service service and support . Our  engineering and support staff understands our niche better than our competition, and it helps our customers remain competitive in their markets.

Every organization has to have a competitive edge  and the dedication to keep its customers satisfied. the Strega team has a great pilot, and a great team of mechanics and engineers  that are dedicated to keep it winning.  Racing and winning at Reno  takes extraordinary efforts.

Congratulations Strega team, and thank you to the Reno Air Racing Association for putting on an outstanding event.

The other night I was having dinner with a fellow who works for an Intel subsidiary and we were talking about how Zerowait continues to grow in this wavering economy. I told him that I am willing to try things that make sense; sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t, but we always try to learn from our mistakes. I told him that we listen to our customers and if something sounds like a good idea we will discuss it within the company to see if it makes sense to give it a try.

Oscar Wilde famously said that “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes”, and that is one way to look at trying new things and burning new synapses. Over the last two decades we have tried many things to build our business into the international business it is today. I can assure you that not everything has gone smoothly, but our goal has always been to provide increasingly better service to our customers as we fulfill their technical service requirements. John Wooden is remembered for saying “If you are not making mistakes, then you are not doing anything.” I have to admit that I make mistakes, just like everyone else. From personal experience I have learned that it is better to recognize the mistake and correct it right away. As a business owner, I have learned that mistakes often lead to inspiration and creative solutions. Therefore, mistakes can create the nexus of an idea for a new product or service for our customers. And our growing customer base seems to want us to continue to try new things which will ultimately provide them even better and unforeseen products and services.

At Zerowait, our staff recognizes that we can learn from our mistakes; therefore we admit them, document them and laugh and learn from them so the company can do better in the future. We’ve built a global business because together we are willing to try new things, and we take the approach that even when they don’t work, it’s better  to try and fail than to remain stuck in the status quo. The market is constantly evolving – are you?

I visited Garth Spencer from Senator Carper’s staff Monday in the Hart Senate Building, and while there had the opportunity to photograph this very small “Senate Waste Receptacle”. I found it rather ironic that I was there to speak about the huge amount of waste the government incurs each year by allowing government IT groups to specify “OEM only” or “New only” for IT purchase and support contracts. Over the last 10 years Zerowait has built an international business by offering exceptional deals on off-lease NetApp systems with transferable software licenses and top notch NetApp support. Along the way we’ve sold and maintained systems for various government and military agencies, saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is a very small percentage of the Federal Government’s IT support expenditures. For the last decade the majority of our hardware, service,  and support business has been with commercial customers, but perhaps the time has come for  Federal Government  departments to tighten their belt also?

I met Larry Freeman, Dr Dedupe, when he used to work with Nathan Thompson at SpectraLogic and I have not heard from him in a number of years. When he worked at SpectraLogic he seemed like he understood what the enterprise storage community was looking for. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to receive the following comments from Larry Freeman to last week’s blog:

Larry Freeman has left a new comment on your post “Increase your storage efficiency, or else!“:

Hi Mike, nice post and good points raised. But you didn’t say what you advised this customer to do. Here are a few tips:

1) Upgrade to the latest version of ONTAP, volume limits have been raised (assuming this customer has a fairly recent NetApp unit that can be upgraded)

ML Answer: Upgrading to NetApp’s version 8 is expensive as it requires moving to 64 bit hardware, forfeiting all of the investment that the customer has in their legacy 32 bit NetApp high availability hardware.

2) Turn on dedupe, compression, and thin provisioning. All are free and will likely reduce storage requirements substantially. The cheapest storage is the one you already own, use it wisely.

ML Answer: We agree with Dr Dedupe that “The cheapest storage is the one you already own”, which is why we work with customers to get the most from their legacy NetApp systems. Whether adding storage, optimizing density, or adding complete systems, using transferable licensed equipment is a great way to get the utility of NetApp without the high cost of new equipment. 

3) Turn on My AutoSupport. It’s also free to all registered NetApp users via the support site support.netapp.com. This tool tells you how efficiently you are managing your storage and provides more tips to reduce your storage footprint.

ML Answer: Autosupport is a great tool, but for security reasons many customers don’t feel comfortable with ‘Big Brother’ reading their ASUP’s. For those looking for more information on their systems, Zerowait offers our own Exception Reporter program which provides our customers with a quick glimpse of storage utilization statistics. Additionally, Zerowait offers a free version of our Exception Reporter to the entire Filer community.

Cheers,

DrDedupe

Beyond helping our customer optimize his current NetApp infrastructure, our engineering team is working with him to see if a SimplStor with either Red Hat XFS or Solaris and ZFS will provide the best combination of affordability and performance at acquisition and into the future. There are upsides to both solutions, and these solutions are far less costly than upgrading to NetApp 8.X hardware and software.

There seems to be a consensus among the storage engineers that we speak with regularly that over the next 5 years there will be an adoption of generic storage solutions and a gradual phasing down of proprietary storage solutions that lock clients into a particular vendor’s offerings. We believe that there will always be a segment of the market that requires the top vendor’s offerings for their tier one solutions, but that off the shelf hardware and open source software will be a major part of most customers’ storage infrastructure in the coming years.

This week I received an email from a customer asking for help. He wrote:

“I’m looking for deep, dense, and cheap. We currently archive to 1TB SATA drives on NetApp with a 4 TB volume size limit. I have share farms on the back end through the ARX that are 18 TB Volumes. I can’t keep spending the amounts of money I’m spending today on storage with our growth rate. So Simplstor looks really good because I don’t need to front end it with any server, I can just plug it into my network, add it to the ARX and start moving data to it.”

This client is not alone:

According to the Chicago Tribune “Firms are going to be a lot more cautious in terms of how they increase spending’’ said Michael Hanson, a senior U.S. economist at Bank of America in New York. In this environment a simple way for an IT department to increase storage capacity is to use third party service and support and also to acquire off lease certified parts for their infrastructures.

In an uncertain economic environment increasing the life cycle of your trusted IT equipment makes business sense, if you can insure the risk of aging high availability equipment. There is no disruption to your user community due to upgrades and migrations, you can contain your costs and your administrators don’t need expensive and disruptive training since they are already familiar with the environment. And tiering, as our client is doing, allows you to add lower cost archival storage without affecting your clients data access expectations.

For the majority of our customers their organization’s storage growth is a constantly growing cost burden similar to the costs of medical care expenses. The reasons for the cost growth are similar also. The costs of Medical insurance are borne by indirect payment entities (insurance companies or the Government) and the costs of storage are borne by IT departments- which act like an IT insurance company for most organizations. In both cases the person using the service typically does not pay directly for the service. Thus there are no market costs or perceived value exchanged between the supplier of the service and the user of the resource. Since the user of Storage is not directly responsible for its acquisition costs, maintenance costs, and ongoing support, the IT department – like a medical insurance company – must find a way to reduce costs to increase efficiency. Unlike the insurance companies, most IT departments cannot raise their budgets (rates) when they can’t reduce their expenses any further. In their case they take the hit instead of the end user. Since the recession started, IT departments have lost personnel and delayed equipment purchases as they reached the limits of efficiency and still had to reduce their budgets.

Storage and network requirements and associated costs are going to continue to increase until there is a way for IT departments to charge their users with actual cost information for their Infrastructure usage. Without direct feedback on the values and costs of Network and storage resources there will always be a disconnect between the providers of the infrastructure and the users of the IT resources. The company that figures out how to capture the costs accurately and price them to the end users accurately will certainly be an investment opportunity to look into.