Zerowait Corporation

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.

I saw an interesting article today written by Chris Mellor in which he speculates on why NetApp’s market share may be declining.

Firstly, NetApp has slipped from second to third place in the rankings compared to the previous quarter. It had a 13.5 per cent share then but has only 12.8 per cent now; whereas IBM, with whom it has changed places, has grown from a 12.2 per cent share to a 13.7 per cent one.

It is not a significant change as yet,  but as the article explains it is an interesting one. Coincidentally, Zerowait is experiencing a significant increase in our  NetApp support service and support contracts and many of our new customers are turning away from NetApp support and upgrades because they don’t see the value add in NetApp’s forced upgrades anymore.

As the overall macro economy continues to wobble, we see more and more customers looking to conserve cash. Zerowait provides two easy ways  for NetApp’s customers to conserve their IT budget dollars.

First – Zerowait’s NetApp support provides our  customers a simple way to get  continued value out of their aging high availability  storage assets.  We are still supporting NetApp systems that are over 10 years old and they are still serving  data reliably.

Second – Zerowait’s SimplStor product line is being embraced by more and more of our NetApp customers as a complementary  and fiscally responsible way to store lower tier data.  Many of our customers are keeping tier one data on their NetApp infrastructure but putting tier two and beyond on our SimplStor products.

If you are looking for an alternative to NetApp’s high priced storage products, licenses, and support why not give one of our offices a call to discuss your storage  issues and infrastructure. Zerowait’s reliable and affordable alternative solutions have been embraced by companies around the world.

As an added bonus for a limited time we are offering our Exception Reporter for free to help you manage your Filers.

They all use Zerowait’s SimplStor products for their fast growing data storage requirements.  Storage is growing across all business sectors in response to regulatory requirements and the data retention policies that continue to blossom. These companies all recognize the value of our SimplStor products and  enterprise storage services.

Our customers recognize that storage can be easily tiered to help them manage their growing storage costs. Using SimplStor our customers can contain storage costs and maintain their high availability service levels that their corporations require.

SimplStor delivers.

Whether you choose Red Hat or Fedora for the O/S –  SimplStor provides reliable, well known architecture. High quality off the shelf hardware means low acquisition costs. And SimplSupport, our integrated monitoring and notification utility, means tier one support, to ensure the reliability you require, while keeping support costs in line. And this simple low cost solution still fits up to 90TB in 4U. SimplStor is the solution to the ever increasing requirements for data retention.

There was an article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about NetApp and the problems they are having in the Federal space.

“By ROLFE WINKLER

Tech investors must be hoping the sector is merely suffering a case of the debt-ceiling sniffles. Unfortunately it may have caught recessionitis.

When storage company NetApp said Wednesday that sales hit a wall in July, it was just the latest to blame the federal government, a huge buyer of tech gear, for slowing sales. Other companies that have cited a stingy Uncle Sam for slower growth include Dell, Cisco Systems, network equipment-makers Brocade Communications and Blue Coat Systems. Hewlett-Packard also cited weak public-sector spending as a reason for its poor outlook.
[Techherd]

Some think of NetApp as a canary in the proverbial coal mine since, in August 2007, the company surprised investors by warning of a broad slowdown in orders among big business customers. The recession began a few months later.

Notably, at that time NetApp said that the strongest parts of its business were with the U.S. federal government, as well as Germany and Northern Europe. But this time the public sector, never mind Europe, isn’t offering a backstop. Even if business customers have so far held to spending plans, William Blair analyst Jason Ader worries that government austerity will cause ripple effects on private investment as the economy slows.

The federal government isn’t the only one cutting back on tech spending. NetApp also said the financial services sector, another huge consumer of tech gear, was broadly weak. That is likely bad news for other tech firms for whom finance companies are key buyers.

NetApp cited the debt ceiling as a reason for the slowdown. So some might argue that because the crisis was resolved, growth will bounce back quickly. The Congressional supercommittee now tasked with deficit reduction might have something to say about that.”

NetApp’s hardware service and support prices remain high, and we think that is the main reason that more and more Federal NetApp Filers are being put under Zerowait Support.

I’ve noted in recent posts the increasing interest in as a replacement/complement for expensive tape backup systems. At only $20,000 for a base 68TB system, SimplStor makes disk to disk backup a viable alternative to tape. Using SimplStor as a nearstore device, you reduce your backup windows, reduce the number of cartridges you need since your dailies will now be on disk, and unless you need a very old copy, greatly reduce the time and effort to do a restore. Factor in the reduced cost of administration now that far less tape work is being done, and SimplStor quickly pays for itself.

Our staff is putting together a paper on the costs of tape backup, and the early numbers are pretty frightening. It can easily run more than $40,000 per year in admin and consumables to backup less than 10TB of data. Purchasing a SimplStor system vs all those tape cartridges will put money back in your budget, while reducing the complexity and time involved in properly backing up your data.

Now, thanks to our leasing partner, we can make SimplStor even more affordable. You can lease our 68TB SimplStor server for less than $10 per TB per month (SSC-36-68 server, $637.76 per month, 36 month term, $1 buy out). Make it a 250TB system and the cost drops to less than $7.50 per TB per month (1 x SSC-36-68 server, 2 x SSA 45-90 add-on shelves, 248TB, $1857.84 per month, 36 month term, $1 buy out).

As a business owner I am acutely aware of how much it costs to run a business, and that it costs more to hire employees and provide them the benefits they deserve than it used to. Since a lot of our customers are in the Financial and Medical sectors of the economy discussions on the implications of Dodd Frank and the effects of the new medical rules and mandates on the costs of doing business are increasing. I often hear that our customers are being caught between allocating budget money for productive purposes or for mandated regulatory compliance.

In 2008 the Small Business Administration published a study  on the cost of compliance with federal regulations:

http://archive.sba.gov/advo/research/rs371tot.pdf

“The portion of regulatory costs that falls initially on businesses was $8,086 per employee in 2008. Small businesses, defined as firms employing fewer than 20 employees, bear the largest burden of federal regulations. As of 2008, small businesses face an annual regulatory cost of $10,585 per employee, which is 36 percent higher than the regulatory cost facing large firms (defined as firms with 500 or more employees).”

Note that these numbers do not include the cost to meet state, county and municipal regulations and rules.

In these sectors with ever increasing costs, everyone recognizes it’s getting harder to hire and maintain a great staff to maintain their high availability networks and storage infrastructures. We’ve heard from our customers that our low cost systems and support release budget dollars to pay staff and meet the ever increasing costs of maintaining each employee. Now, a growing number of customers are outsourcing their storage administration tasks to Zerowait, avoiding the regulatory burden and costs of hiring additional employees while continuing to provide the data access their customers require.

No matter how the global economy changes there are always going to be reasons for organizations to economize. Zerowait is focused on providing the services and products our customers need  at prices that enable them to reach their goals.