Zerowait Corporation

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.

Governor Markell Visits Zerowait

Delaware’s Governor Markell visited Zerowait’s HQ today to learn more about our NetApp Storage support , technology, and our fast growing SimplStor product line. We discussed the amount of international business we do and how we are growing our business even in these difficult Economic times through our focus on our international market niche.  The Governor’s team was interested in our technology and services and in particular  how Zerowait  can help the big banks that are located in Delaware save money on their storage infrastructure as their storage requirements continue to grow.

Governor Markell’s team highlighted how Delaware has a great location midway between DC and New York and they were impressed how a company started in Delaware has grown into an international  business, and liked the fact that Zerowait’s Delaware built products were being used in the Australian VFX business.

It was great having the Governor visit our facility today.

I read an article today that BluArc was purchased by HDS. We have several customers in the Media and entertainment businesses that have some BluArc in their storage environments.

“TOKYO | Thu Sep 8, 2011 1:30am EDT

(Reuters) – Hitachi Ltd (6501.T) said on Thursday it has bought struggling California-based network storage company BlueArc Corp in an all-cash transaction after a five-year OEM partnership, in the latest such move to take advantage of the yen’s strength.

Hitachi did not reveal the cost of the acquisition, but Japan’s Asahi newspaper said it was about $500-600 million.”

It will be interesting to see what Hitachi does with the product line and the support of the product over the next few years. The acquisition highlights another reason why our customers who worked with us on the  development of Zerowait’s SimplStor product line were emphatic in their desire that we build and support an open source non proprietary Operating System and File System as primary features and benefits of SimplStor. Our customers understand that the expense and maintenance of Proprietary Operating Systems and File Systems adds to their costs.  What seems like a great feature in a proprietary software or firmware can become a liability when the code is no longer supported.