Zerowait Corporation

Over the years I have advocated that organizations embrace a Disaster Prevention model instead of a Disaster Recovery model. Using server load balancers and some multiple MX records it is relatively easy to create a high availability web presence.  Creating a high availability solution for the critical data behind the firewall is also getting easier as disk capacity and network bandwidth increase. Using legacy high availability equipment provides an easy second tier solution and based on the response of our customers, Zerowait’s SimplStor is a great tier three solution for tape replacement.

The European division of EMC has a pdf  available that illustrates the issues  surrounding Disaster Preparedness.

Across Europe, 49% of companies are obligated by either insurance policies or regulatory requirements to have a disaster recovery plan. However, with the right backup and disaster recovery approach, companies can achieve cost-savings from insurers. Just over a quarter of the organisations surveyed were offered reduced premiums by their insurance provider depending on their IT systems backup/disaster recovery strategy.

Unraveling tape: 40% still depend on tape
but majority are looking to replace it
The research found that businesses are spending, on average, 10% of their IT budgets on backup and recovery, and 29% of businesses do not feel they are spending enough. For backup and disaster recovery purposes, 40% of companies still rely on tape, with an average annual cost of €74,000 on transporting, storing, testing and replacing tapes. Where tape is used for disaster recovery purposes, 10% still have an employee take home a copy of the backup tapes with them.

Overall, 80% of organisations using tape are looking to move beyond it, with the top reasons cited as:

    Speed of restoration 39%
    Faster backups 33%
    Lack of durability 26%

EMC has done a service to the industry with this report, and it highlights the costs and problems  very well.  If you think the costs of an EMC solution exceed your budget I hope you will consider Zerowait’s solutions. We can provide your organization  an affordable alternative for your Disaster Recovery plan in Europe, Australia, or the USA.

This week I was at the Supercomputer show in Seattle visiting with our customers and friends. I ran into people Zerowait has been doing business with all over the show floor and it was hard to walk down an aisle without bumping into someone I knew. Repeatedly, I heard about how our customers and friends were having a hard time coping with expanding storage requirements and shrinking storage budgets.

Based on the conversations I had at the show on Tuesday, I emailed back to our office and the marketing department created a special based on the transferable licensed filers that we have available, and distributed it on Wednesday. The customer response to the specials has been enthusiastic and many of our customers want expedited delivery and installation.

If you are looking for an affordable NetApp Filer with transferable licenses please call one of our international offices to discuss you exact configuration requirements and the delivery schedule you require. Whether your company is forecasting a great 2012 or looking at how to muddle through, Zerowait can help your organization get the enterprise class NetApp storage you need at a price your management can’t ignore.

The path to a successful storage archive solution should not start with a Root Cause Analysis.   Looking back and pointing fingers is often the easiest path to take, but reviewing your storage strategy and current infrastructure may reveal a very easy and affordable data protection strategy.  Archiving to tape is a great solution but it is not a 100% solution;  tapes get lost, data gets corrupted and often there is an expensive time lapse between a discovery of data loss and its recovery.  Keeping all of your data on tier (1) arrays is expensive and does not make sense for rarely accessed data.  Thanks to our customers’ requests for an affordable end to end solution, Zerowait now has a complete storage solution for customers who love their Filers and are looking to get rid of their tape headaches.

Many of our NetApp customers would like to use NetApp equipment as their tier (2) storage, since it allows them to use the same interface and tools on their tier (1) storage, minimizing management issues, but the cost of new systems is too high to make this work. For these customers Zerowait provides readily available off-lease NetApp systems with transferable licenses to build affordable tier (2)  storage solutions. Many customers locate these systems in remote back-up sites, and our customers snap mirror updates between their Tier (1) NetApp systems and off lease NetApp  tier (2) systems to achieve a reliable archive strategy.

The next tier for many  customers has been  tape, but quite a few of our customers have decided that they are tired of the warehousing  headaches and rush delivery costs  of their tape archives and want to reduce their tape  costs and frustrations. They are replacing all or most of their tape with Zerowait’s SimplStor for tier (3) archival storage.  Using NetApp’s tools,  our customers can mirror their data between NetApp filers in multiple locations and then copy the data to a SimplStor tier (3) archive using standard software tools.  SimplStor costs about the same as tape, but provides instant access when there is the requirement for a quick restoration of data.

Zerowait‘s customers around the world are able to satisfy their requirements for an affordable high reliability storage strategy.   Our customers have embraced  a  strategy  of data tiering strategy using  new  NetApp equipment for tier  (1)  highly accessed data,  off lease Filers for  tier (2)  and  remote mirrors,  and SimplStor for tier (3) archival storage requirements. If you have chosen NetApp for your tier (1) storage, why not use transferable licensed NetApp equipment your tier (2) storage?  It is an obvious cost effective solution.  Our customers in the Animation, Science and Petrochemical business helped us design SimplStor and now are our biggest customers for the product.  They knew they needed a reliable tier (3) solution and they recognized that Zerowait could provide the enterprise support they required.  Thanks to our customers‘ ideas Zerowait now provides high reliability hardware, service and support for all three tiers of enterprise data.  Please contact us if you want to discuss how Zerowait can provide your organization outstanding Quality of Service at a reasonable price.

Many of our customers are at the end of their budget cycle and asked us to help them get the storage they need at a price they can afford before the new year. We put together these specials to help our customers weather the economic storms. It certainly seems that whether the economy is going up or down storage demand continues to grow.

Zerowait will be attending the Super Computer Show in Seattle next week. We will be visiting with many of our Animation and Big Science customers. We hope to see you there.

Even the government can save money!

Last week we went to DC to meet with a few clients who are looking to expand their Data Storage without busting their budgets. We discussed how Zerowait helps organizations around the world with our legacy service for NetApp equipment and also the ins and outs of acquiring NetApp systems with transferable licenses.  One of our Federal  clients  is very interested in  our SimplStor products for their  on line archives and tier 2 /3 storage.

Many Federal departments and agencies are Zerowait customers. And it was really fun to go to the Pentagon!

Saving the government money is everyone’s business.

Our customers are telling us every week that they want to simplify their data storage and network infrastructures. Overwhelmingly they feel that the best way to accomplish a reduction in complexity is by removing pretentious proprietary software and hardware vendors from their supported systems. They need to reduce costs without affecting their high reliability data access.  Is it possible to reduce costs while data storage and content delivery requirements continue to grow?

When it comes to storage most organizations find out fairly quickly that the vast majority of their data has not been accessed in the past 90 days, and much of it has not been looked at in over a year. Executives are asking their IT staff’s “Why is this storage being kept on the most expensive storage in the organization?” Before the 2008 Financial Panic the answer was typically “It is easier to keep all storage on the primary disk although it is expensive, we require less staff.” In technology simplicity often trumps cost and when times are good no one was looking at their marginal cost of storage for secondary, tertiary and dead data. Putting everything on your recently purchased EMC or NetApp storage solution made things easy. But technology has moved on, multi vendor storage maintenance, interoperability, and support is not as complex as it was just a couple of years ago. As many of our customers have suffered staff reductions, Zerowait is now helping them manage their storage infrastructures and helping them retain the high availability they need at a cost they can afford.

Can your organization easily reduce the cost and complexity of your data storage assets and infrastructure? There are plenty of alternatives available now that will allow you to reduce the cost of your archival storage. Clearly all organizations view their storage assets differently based on history, experiences, and cost. There have been plenty of books, and hundreds of articles written on data storage classifications, and I am certain there will be many more written.

I think everyone can agree that organizations have multiple tiers of storage, although they classify them very differently. Whether you are looking to cut your costs by using cloud storage providers, outsourcing, off shoring, or a managed service provider, there is one thing you must be certain of, your organization absolutely must have access to your data storage assets to succeed. Without data access your organization won’t have the competitive edge it needs to survive in the global marketplace.

Zerowait can help your organization classify your data, reduce your costs, and maintain high availability data access.

Zerowait has a tremendous stock of NetApp equipment in our warehouses across the globe and this month we are featuring several specials from our NetApp inventory and also on our SimplStor product line. Please click on the image below for more information on the products featured this month.

The Oracle Trade show is this week  in San Francisco and NetApp is a Premier sponsor of the show. I’ll bet the Oracle Press release is making for some interesting conversations with customers at the NetApp booth.

 “Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage 7420 Appliance delivered 2x the performance
 at less than half the cost per SPC-1 IOPS of NetApp’s FAS 3270A on the
 SPC-1 benchmark (1).”

I made a collage of the different images available on the Web about the press release and the show.

If Oracle’s ZFS solutions are  truly 1/2  the cost and offer twice the performance of NetApp’s current systems I believe that many NetApp customers will be forced to review their IT storage budgets. Our customers include many budget minded  IT staffs that use Oracle on NetApp equipment that Zerowait supports  and this announcement will certainly get their attention.

NetApp equipment has many features that make their storage equipment versatile and reliable. One reason for Zerowait’s continued growth in the NetApp service business is because our customers like the reliability of NetApp,  but not the cost of upgrading their equipment on a three year cycle. Zerowait offers these customers an affordable high availability way to extend the life cycle of their NetApp equipment.

If Oracle begins to offer trade in incentives to Oracle users who migrate  their storage off NetApp gear I think Oracle will get some good traction in the marketplace.

Over the last two weeks I was traveling around the USA visiting customers in NV, TX, AZ, and  CO.   It is a lot of fun to visit with customers and hear them tell me  how Zerowait has made their storage management and maintenance tasks easier and more affordable.  As regular readers know, Zerowait has specialized in the niche of NetApp legacy support for almost ten years  and we have been working with NetApp equipment since 1998.  Over the years we have built up a large and loyal customer base, and now our  NetApp support customers are  adding our SimplStor product line  to their Storage infrastructure  on an ever increasing basis.

Last week I was meeting with a customer in the Phoenix, AZ area and he  told me that their storage budget for 2012  already includes Zerowait’s legacy support for their NetApp equipment and a SimplStor for tape replacement. 

I was in Denver, Colorado talking to a customer earlier this week  and he said that “Zerowait has turned the storage model upside down.” We laughed about that comment and I asked him to explain why he said that. From our customer’s point of view Zerowait is a service company and the introduction of a hardware platform by a service company is unique. I doubt if it is unique, but it is unusual.

SimplStor is the culmination  of conversations with our customers who wanted a long term, reliable, storage solution that  did not lock them into the proprietary vendor’s upgrade cycle.   By using high reliability proven commercially available components and best of breed open source software we created a storage platform that answers the needs of our international customers.

Whether I was talking to customers on an individual basis or in groups  at the SEG show in San Antonio, our customers were enthusiastic about our company, services and products.