Zerowait Corporation

The uncertainty surrounding the enterprise disk marketplace seems to be causing EMC to mention that it has a disk shortage and there will be a price increase.  Dave Raffo in  his blog has the following interesting information:

EMC vice chairman Bill Teuber sent an email to customers and partners stating the vendor has eaten price increases so far, but will begin to pass them along to customers after this month. He also wrote that EMC does not expect supply problems because it is the largest vendor of external storage systems, but it has to pay more for the available drives.

“EMC has absorbed the price increases that have been passed on to us and will continue to do so through the end of the month,” Teuber wrote. “Unfortunately we will not be able to sustain that practice. Beginning in Q1 2012 we will be increasing the list price of hard disk drives up to 15% for an indefinite period of time. While we hope that this increase is temporary, at this time we cannot forecast how long the flooding in Thailand will impact HDD [hard disk drive] pricing.”

Another email Teuber sent to EMC personnel said the price increases will be from 5% to 15%. He also wrote the increases will apply to all EMC product lines.

The shortage is expected to affect PC drives more than enterprise drives, but EMC enterprise storage rival NetApp lowered its revenue projection last month because of expected shortages.

Teuber referred to NetApp indirectly in his email, stating “Many of our competitors have already announced drive shortages and price increases and have stated that this will have a material impact on their ability to hit revenue expectations now and in the future.”

Zerowait has been experiencing an uptick in our array shelf and disk storage sales over the last few weeks, but we thought it had to do with the great prices we are now offering on some of our storage specials. But the upward trend in our storage sales business  could be  because we have a lot of stock which we can ship immediately,  while  the OEM’s may be allocating disks based on their own supply calculations.

We had a great year in 2011, and we are looking forward to next year.

Yesterday afternoon I had a long conversation with a customer of ours in California that told me that they were looking at some new  NetApp storage equipment, but were told by their Salesperson that the floods in Thailand have rippled through NetApp’s supply chain and that NetApp could not guarantee a delivery time frame. This was predicted by NetApp and discussed by  Thomas Georgeons:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/308538-netapp-management-discusses-q2-2012-results-earnings-call-transcript

“Looking ahead, the impact of the Thailand flooding can potentially be the biggest swing factor on both our top and bottom line in the second half. The large buyer drives we did, as this was all unfolding, should sustain us through a good part of Q3 but probably not all of it. Although enterprise class drives are considered to be the least impacted, we still anticipate some amount of supply and pricing complexity. We have all heard the predictions of the industry analyst and the drive vendors themselves. Some of the information is conflicting and most of it is changing daily in regards to scope and ultimate impact.”

We are working with this customer and several others to help them get through their end of year storage requirements with transferable licensed filers, and shelves of disks that we have in stock and ready for shipment. 

We want to help  loyal NetApp customers maintain their equipment, and we can help them grow their NetApp infrastructure even during the disk shortage. If you need storage during the shortage, please give us a call at one of our international offices .

2011 Is shaping up to be the best year ever for Zerowait’s independent NetApp support business. We have already surpassed last year’s sales of our Zerowait Parts Assurance contracts on NetApp equipment from our offices in the USA, UK, and Australia. We expect to see our growth continue next year due to economic uncertainty.  At Zerowait we understand that our customers are under severe budget pressure to control their storage infrastructure costs, and with our customers help we have come up with several support programs which help our customers control their NetApp storage growth and support costs.

Recognizing that post warranty support and extending  time in service for systems reduces new unit sales, I am occasionally asked by storage analysts focused on NetApp how much of an effect Zerowait has on NetApp’s new product sales. I don’t believe there is any way to calculate how many NetApp customers have put off a system upgrade due to Zerowait’s support in any single period. However, over the last decade Zerowait has built a dynamic, thriving, international business in third party support for NetApp equipment.  And our customers in the financial, entertainment, health and government sectors throughout the world continue to recommend our company to their peers.

Whether you need an additional storage shelf, transferable licensed system, or a support contract, Zerowait will work with you to meet your support and budget requirements.

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.