Zerowait Corporation

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.

Jeff Klein, a long term customer of Zerowait’s, recently wrote an article for tech zone about independent third party support and refurbished parts for legacy Information Technology equipment. It is a well written article and I think it is worth your time to understand the issues involved. Here are some interesting excerpts.

* “The Federal Government spent $2,034,269,948 on new equipment while only spending only $9,114,676 on refurbished. A resounding 99.6 percent of Federal IT dollars was spent with OEMs and OEM authorized resellers.”

* “Still others [OEMs] issue fictitious list prices. These can be a much as 200 to 300 percent higher than what they will charge a good customer, i.e., they can offer the perception of huge discounts to end customers while asking independents to pay much higher list prices for the same product or part.”

Jeff’s article ends with this :

“The solution is simple. Corporate IT buyers must join with their independent suppliers to demand that manufacturers: 1. Stop their attacks on independents. 2. Call on the U.S. Department of Justice to commence hearings to determine if AGMA is in violation of anti-trust laws. Without coordinated action, competition will continue to be curtailed, prices will rise, choices will be limited and free trade in America will be a little less free. ”

http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2012/07/24/300192-how-americas-top-oems-trying-crush-third-party.htm

Over the last few days I have been in Sydney, Australia visiting with our staff and clients here. Zerowait Corp. PTY has been in Australia for just over 18 months and we have quite a few customers in the media and financial services business sectors here.  Every time I come here I am more impressed with the engineering and technical staffs of the companies we visit. There is a lot of ingenuity here, and our SimplStor Products and  independent NetApp support are doing well here.

Last night I was at a gathering of VFX folks in Newtown at the Marly bar and I was talking to folks about robotics and developments in camera technology for film and animation. The VFX community here includes customers of ours in the commercials business, movie business, and the TV business, and I really enjoy coming to Sydney for these evening gatherings. I wish that we could put events like this together in the USA. As mentioned previously in this blog the Aussies have great beer and it is hard not to enjoy a few of them when you are out in the evening with customers and friends.

Laurence Jones, who runs our office in Lane Cove West has pulled things together over the last year and a half  and set up an excellent office. Our business in  Australia is  doing really great thanks to his efforts. It is really pretty amazing to think back to November of 2010 when one of our customers asked us to set up the  Australian operation and to see that  18 months later we have a growing business that is gaining more customers every month.

Finally, I can’t say enough good things about our Attorney’s in Sydney. As an American, dealing with the rules and regulations of setting up a company in Australia and keeping things consistent between the two countries  different business law systems has been an education.  After 18 months we have finally gotten things figured out.  Based on what we have accomplished we expect that over the next 18 months we will  substantially increase our business in Australia.

Over the last few months the Zerowait‘s customers have been telling us that their budgets are uncertain and that they would be putting off new equipment purchases for a while.  There seems to be an inverse  correlation between the growth of our NetApp legacy support business and the reported drop in USA manufacturing activity.

July 2, 2012  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304211804577502543898983040.html

By KATHLEEN MADIGAN

The U.S. manufacturing sector contracted in June for the first time since July 2009 as new demand crashed, according to data released Monday by the Institute for Supply Management.

The ISM’s manufacturing purchasing managers’ index plunged to 49.7 last month from 53.5 in May. A reading above 50 indicates expanding activity.

As Business and Economic uncertainty increases, more customers are seeking a reliable and dependable source for affordable enterprise storage support and upgrades. Zerowait has been providing high availability service and support to NetApp users for over a decade and we have grown into an international company through the recommendation and referrals of our customers.

The caution lights are on, and CFO’s are putting storage budgets on hold. That means affordable alternatives must be found and Zerowait is  the logical choice for many customer looking for a safe harbor in these unpredictable times.

If you are in a quandary, and trying to work through your puzzling budget process, why not consider a Zerowait support alternative for your NetApp equipment?  Zerowait has the answer.

Multi Billion Dollar storage vendors fear the evolution of generic storage solutions which seem to be growing more robust and reliable monthly.  If your company is locked into a storage vendor’s feature sets and they are making an effort to force you to upgrade, what affordable choices are available that can meet your growing storage needs when there is no more budget for additional resources?

The first option that comes to mind was touched on in last week’s blog.  If your budget is tight and you are locked into your vendor’s feature sets, why not purchase the Vendor’s off lease equipment? This equipment has been expertly maintained by the Vendor as part of their lease agreements and is certified by the vendor for installation and resale. This is a simple, obvious, and affordable solution embraced by Zerowait’s customers around the world.

The second option is to look into creating tiers of storage based on your company’s own usage patterns. Almost every study agrees that well below 25% of storage is first tier data required to be on high availability storage. Additionally, the studies show that most data is rarely accessed after the first 90 days. That is why a lot of companies migrate data based on date of last access to a secondary storage array. There are multiple software programs to do this and many techniques have been around for decades. Implementation is easy, the cost of secondary storage is affordable as storage requirements grow, and organizations are quickly recognizing the value of storage tiers.

While these two options seem to cover most of our customers’ needs, occasionally we have a customer who has a different need. Last week I wrote about the battle for storage value, and coincidentally this week we heard from a customer of ours that wants a substantial number of our SimplStor units for a very specific task in their field offices to transmit data to their central data facilities. They have many field data collection points, and the data is increasingly valuable as it is aggregated with other data. Field collection can be on affordable, high reliability SimplStor servers. The data on the SimplStor equipment will then be aggregated onto off lease high availability NetApp equipment, which is affordable, in stock, and easily expandable. And when that data is used for modeling it will be uploaded to the latest generation NetApp filers, direct from the manufacturer, for optimum performance.

Our customer is right; he understood his data assets and values and saw that by turning the typical data storage model around a bit he can save his company hundreds of thousands of dollars.  This is another example of why it pays to listen to what our customers have to say.

The Battles of Storage Features are mostly over; the Battles for Storage Value have begun.

Over the last few months the stock market has marked a steady decline in NetApp’s market valuation and there are rumors again about NetApp being acquired. While EMC and NetApp fight over market share, storage administrators are looking for ways to squeeze value out of their already existing storage infrastructures. Our customers are asking us for creative ways to add storage to their infrastructures so they can put off buying new equipment.

In this age of storage budget austerity a sudden surge in storage requirements for a new application or database could disable a stable storage infrastructure. Despite the strengths of a well-designed storage infrastructure – a solid operating system, a creative and savvy team of Network and Storage administrators – things could get very ugly very fast in the data center. Nobody wants to be the on-call engineer when the last bit of unassigned storage is used up. Experienced Storage and  Network engineers don’t define ‘professionalism’ as being unprepared; they look for reliable and affordable solutions which they can depend on when the storage hits the fan.

But if an available storage crisis is easy to imagine, a solution to the crisis is harder to see if your team is myopic and can only see the solutions offered by the big storage providers. Many large companies’ storage infrastructures are so big and complex that the simple and obvious solutions are often overlooked.

One of the easiest solutions to implement are off-lease systems of legacy equipment from the big storage providers that are plug and play and certified by the manufacturer. They’ve been expertly maintained by the manufacturer and are guaranteed to work in your current storage environment. Additionally, there are Open Source High Reliability mass storage solutions available that make migrating secondary storage assets easy and affordable.

Another aspect of Storage Value is extended support. Big storage manufacturers have been blackmailing their customers with their “End of Life.” product announcement threats. They play chicken, hoping that their customers are so frightened by their threat to end support of older systems that they win sales of their newer equipment. But independent support companies provide an alternative to the forced upgrade, with many offering global service, support, and monitoring. A few of these companies have been providing high availability support services for over a decade to the largest companies and government agencies and have a reputation for excellence that surpasses the OEM’s. Many companies now view the OEM’s EOL threats as the shouts of a spoiled child who has lost his advantage to the new kid in town.

Smaller companies and organizations charted the path to independent legacy support years ago because their budgets were already tight and they were not as attractive to the sales team of the big storage OEM’s. But as the world economy encounters more headwinds caused by economic uncertainties bigger organizations are looking for credible storage alternatives. Since the larger companies are staffed with great negotiators who know how to play game, they often will allow an independent service organization into their data center to keep the OEM honest. But as budgetary austerity kicks into high gear the independent storage support provider can provide better and more cost effective service and support than the manufacturer can. The OEM’s now face global competition for their service and support by entrepreneurial and nimble organizations dedicated to outstanding service and support in their chosen niches.

Enterprise Storage manufacturers use the threat of an “End of Life “announcement to induce an unwarranted fear of storage infrastructure collapse within their customers. And in a growing economy with storage budgets in abundance the threats can often drive an organization to make the decision to upgrade to the latest and greatest equipment available. But times have changed, and reliable alternatives exist. The new austerity will likely cause a review of storage assets and upgrade paths. And the best run companies will recognize that maintaining and expanding the reliable equipment they have is much more affordable than the costs involved with buying new equipment and enduring another expensive and lengthy data migration.

The Battle for storage value is already under way. And Zerowait is growing.