Zerowait Corporation

Over the last several weeks a friend of mine has been working his way through a recommendation from his hardware vendor as to whether he should upgrade his storage hardware and software. He is being cautious because he has done upgrades before and found that sometimes he gets only some of the benefits that his vendors’ Analysts, Engineers and Sales teams have promised. Sometimes upgrading has made his storage infrastructure less efficient by his internal metrics and he does not want to experience that again.

Discussing the options over the last few weeks we came up with a series of questions he wants his vendors to answer before he upgrades:

1) Does this vendor mandated software or hardware upgrade solve a significant problem that is unlikely to have a patch or repair kit in the near future so that we can maintain our current hardware solution?

2) Is the vendor unbiased in their upgrade recommendation, or is this mandated upgrade a tool for their own revenue enhancement ?

3) Does the vendor mandated solution actually address any systemic issues that we are experiencing?

4) What is the complete range of solutions that can solve our vendor’s mandated upgrade, besides the upgrade ? Is “do nothing at all” a viable solution that we could live with?

5) What problems will arise from implementing the vendor’s mandated solution? Can we identify all of the problems and costs before we select a solution?

6) Would the vendor’s solution solve our problem less expensively than another solution. What are our manpower and additional infrastructure costs if we implement the change?

7) Will implementing the vendors solution cause our users any downtime, or additional manpower after we implement the change?

Most hardware and software vendors concentrate on identifying and providing solutions which selling their products to their customers will solve. That is not the same thing as providing customers solutions to their own storage infrastructure problems.

Over the last few months we have seen an increase in interest in our NetApp support services, and the interest has turned into a lot of new customers and orders. Based on the conversations that our staff has had with our new customers I think there is a combination of reasons for the increase in our business.

First, NetApp is giving their customers End of Life (EOL) notifications on a lot of equipment. For many enterprises upgrading to new 64 bit equipment is not currently an option in their budget plans.

Second, there is fear in the boardrooms of many organizations that we are in an era reminiscent of the 1970’s stagflation. One of my friends sent me this link this morning which describes the concerns in his company’s executive office well:

“With inflation rising and GDP forecasts continuing to be revised downward, fears of stagflation have crept back into the economy, with the economy hovering in a dangerous position between two possible outcomes: recovery or crash.

Stagflation is a sort of market purgatory, while we wait for one of two possibilities. Either the economy will recover and we’ll have inflation, or the economy will continue to stagnate, and we’ll end up with deflation.

While we will eventually work our way out of stagflation, inflation is hard to maintain if the global economy goes into a slowdown or decline. When the economy does begin to recover, it will bring inflation.

With QE2, Fed Chairman Bernanke has opened Pandora’s box, and once you open the box, it’s hard to control. When the banks start lending again, it will unleash the reserves that the Fed has pumped into the economy and there will be big inflation.”

Whether your company is trying to maintain legacy NetApp equipment, or trying to reduce expenditures due to economic fears, Zerowait has affordable solutions for NetApp service and support. Additionally, our SimplStor is a complementary archive storage alternative which starts at just $20,000.00 for 68 TB.

As many of our clients know we occasionally hold training classes for them on issues relating to Filers and storage issues. Above is a class picture of the class that finished today. Our clients asked great questions and we received good comments on our class and a couple of good suggestions on how we can improve it for our next class.

We believe that educating our customers benefits us as much as them, and our customers seem to agree. We learned a lot from this class of customers about the operational and budget issues that affect their storage. An interesting topic in this class and in others we have had is the many different ways that clients handle their primary and archival storage growth.

Our customer students really like our Exception Reporter and told us that it is a great tool for managing their filers. They also really like our SimplStor, in fact, one of our students in this class called a friend of his and now we are quoting his friend’s company on a SimplStor.

We will be holding two more classes this year, and one of them will be in our Sydney office.

Sydney Opera House top picture, Auckland Harbor bottom picture

I flew back from Sydney on Thursday, and I have been trying to catch up from the trip since I returned. There certainly are a lot of customers in Australia and New Zealand that were happy to talk to us about our Affordable Alternatives to NetApp’s service and support, and there was tremendous interest in our SimplStor our complementary archiving solution.

As many of our customers know I have been traveling in Australia and New Zealand visiting our customers here. Interest in our SimplStor storage products is strong among the media, entertainment, insurance and financial industries of Australia and New Zealand. The media and entertainment business in particular is experiencing growing storage requirements due to the requirements of High Definition and 3D as is highlighted in this article:

* “Data storage is among the fastest growing industries in the world and the segment has witnessed unprecedented activity in terms of M&As over the past year.”

* “In recent years the advent of social media and increased user activity on the web has led to rapid increase in digital content creation and sharing, sparking a tremendous rise in demand for data storage.”

* “Large Sized 3D Videos and High Resolution Images to Drive Demand”

While storage growth is not as vigorous in the financial and insurance sectors as in the entertainment business, it is still strong for Zerowait due to the requirements for an affordable complementary archive storage solution like SimplStor.

SimplStor is based on our customers’ design requirements for a reliable and affordable secondary storage and archival disk solution. Based on the enthusiastic responses we’ve received from the folks I have been meeting with, I believe we met our customers’ requirements.

Zerowait has been working with NetApp equipment since 1998, and over the years we have diagnosed three common causes for our customers’ headaches:

First – NetApp’s post warranty support is very expensive.

Second– NetApp uses expensive post warranty support to push hardware upgrades too soon – and they are also too expensive and hard to cost justify.

Third – NetApp’s autosupports are difficult to interpret and hard to explain to management.

Working with our clients we have developed treatments to cure these maladies:

First – To solve the headaches caused by out of control NetApp support costs, Zerowait’s customers rely on our ZPA support contracts that start at just $1500/yr. With 24/7 access to engineers, next business day hardware replacement and Exception Reporter monitoring autosupports, our customers tell us the only difference between Zerowait and NetApp is the price. For your mission critical systems, affordable on site spares kits are readily available and provide for immediate replacement of failed components.

Second – To relieve the pain of the migraine caused by NetApp’s prices for storage expansions and upgrades, Zerowait can provide plug and play storage shelves and off lease transferable licensed equipment that is eligible for NetApp support or Zerowait’s affordable alternatives.

Third – Zerowait’s Exception Reporter provides an easy to understand dashboard of capacity and performance that even management can understand! Additionally, Exception Reporter includes a searchable knowledgebase of issues and answers that has been developed over years of working with filers.

For a limited time Zerowait is offering our weekly Exception Reporter for free to the NetApp community. This handy tool will help you diagnose and maintain your high availability storage. Please click on this link to sign up for this great stress reduction tool and reduce your management headaches.

We understand that there are common problems and unique issues which Storage Administrators face on a daily basis. If you would like our help in diagnosing your Filers issues please give us a call at any of our international offices to discuss your problems with one of our technical experts.

Over the years since we started selling NetApp equipment in 1998 we learned that the Sys Admins and the Network Admins loved their NetApp equipment. The problem for many of the storage folks was that purchasing new NetApp equipment required justifications and often a large capital expenditure which was hard to acquire from management. Additionally, within a few years of acquisition they faced a forced upgrade or high annual support costs for their NetApp legacy equipment. Both options create difficult choices for many Storage Administrators, most of whom don’t enjoy writing budget proposals or costs justification.

In 2002, we answered many of our customers questions and concerns about the high cost of Legacy NetaApp support when we introduced our independent enterprise level service and support for NetApp equipment at a very reasonable price point. Yearly service contracts start at just $1500.00/yr USD. Since 2002, our business has grown into an international business supporting filers all over the world from our offices in the USA, UK and Australia mostly by word of mouth references and referrals.

In 2008 we began to hear from our customers that they needed an enterprise archive solution that was affordable, reliable, easily scalable, and built to last for the long term without the 2 to 3 year forced upgrade that NetApp seems to favor. Working with our customers through 2009 we designed a storage solution that could provide them a PetaByte of storage that would help keep their bean counters smiling in the back offices.

We began selling our SimplStor in 2010 and we are introducing our newest release of the product in June. And just like last year’s version, we have customers who have ordered the product for delivery already and we have our first installation scheduled for early June with an international client.

For 2011, we increased our SimplStor density and performance, and upgraded the File System while keeping our price point low and easy to understand. The base head includes 68TB of storage and lists for $20,000.00 USD, and if you want to add our 90TB shelves the list price is $20,000. SimplStor is simple to install, simple to expand, includes one year of parts replacement and meets the price point that our customers requested.

Our customers depend on their NetApp equipment, and with Zerowait support they can continue to use it for their primary storage. With SimplStor our customers now have a complimentary option for their NetApp primary storage when they need an affordable archive solution for their secodary and tertiary storage requirements.

In addition, when our customers add a F5 ARX switch, they can easily implement a seamless storage tiering and single namespace strategy.

If you are looking for an affordable, reliable and scalable enterprise storage solution, Zerowait has the answer.

Zerowait’s service and support business has been growing at a brisk pace since the beginning of the year and we attribute that to the hesitance of corporations to invest in capital budget equipment like storage arrays. It seems that our customers are looking for storage solutions that don’t require capital budget justifications, reports and signatures.

Zerowait’s NetApp support solutions typically fall into our customers operational budgets, and our SimplStor enterprise Storage starts at $20,000 for 68TB which falls within most of our customers OPEX budgets.

Today there was is an article on the CNBC site that discusses the stodgy growth of the US economy and lowered growth estimates.

* U.S. economic growth slowed more than expected in the first quarter as higher food and gasoline prices dampened consumer spending, and sent a broad measure of inflation rising at its fastest pace in 2-1/2 years.

* The Federal Reserve on Wednesday acknowledged the slowdown in first-quarter growth, describing the recovery as proceeding at a “moderate pace”—a slight step back from a statement in March when it said the economy was on a “firmer footing.”

* It trimmed its growth estimate for 2011 to between 3.1 and 3.3 percent from a 3.4 to 3.9 percent January projection.

These may be some reasons why many companies are looking to extend the lifespan of their current NetApp storage, or considering switching to our SimplStor arrays.

The linkages between oil prices and our little niche of enterprise storage may seem obscure, but in a global marketplace a small disruption or price fluctuation can cause unexpected anomalies in the supply chain of energy, production and information storage.

An article in the Financial Times today pinpoints some issues and possible outcomes.

* “Say what you will about the various causes of past U.S. recessions, but economists at HSBC offer a sobering observation. Since the 1970s, a doubling of the real price of oil, which is the oil price relative to overall inflation, within the span of a year has almost always been followed by declining GDP. The two exceptions are the 1990-91 recession, when prices spiked but did not quite double, and 1987, when prices did double, followed by slower growth but no recession. Today, a doubling would require prices to rise to about $150. “

* “Looking across the global economy, separate studies at Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital do not suggest a total derailment of the global recovery, but do imply a serious bout of 1970s-style stagflation, a combination of sluggish growth with high inflation. The Barclays analysts conclude that a rise to $150, if sustained at that level, would cut global growth by about 0.75 percentage points, while adding as much as 3 points to global inflation. Morgan Stanley, using a different approach, would expect a 1 percentage point loss of growth and 1 additional point in inflation as result of oil at $140. The global economy, including fast-growing emerging markets, is generally expected to grow about 4 percent this year; it is said to be in a recession when growth dips below 3 percent.”

* “The big worry right now is the combination of inflexible fiscal policy and still-fragile credit markets, say the HSBC analysts, especially in developed economies. Their government budgets are already stretched and unable to offer much support in case of a recession, and their economies may not yet be strong enough to withstand the higher interest rates that central banks might use to keep inflation under control. That means a spike in oil prices could not come at a worse time, and once again the global economy is at the mercy of its oil supplies.”

What does this mean for the Enterprise Storage business? It is hard to tell, but if IT folks find their budget tightening, we hope they will consider our affordable support for their NetApp equipment as one way to save on their storage infrastructure.

We live in a global marketplace and the interruption of supply in Japan can have an effect on the global storage market. How long will it take before the distribution channels and factory inventories get used up is anybody’s guess. But the folks at Xyratex have noted that there is a risk of material supply disruptions.

“The level of component supply disruption resulting from the Japanese disaster is not yet fully understood by the wider electronic industry nor the result in potential demand implication for disk drive and other components. Separately, in our Invest business, the acquisition of LSI’s Engenio storage division by NetApp should have no material impact to our existing business with NetApp. And in our view potentially strengthens our position as the leading independent OEM provider of enterprise class storage systems in the market. Overall, I remain optimistic with regard to our future growth as a result of all the recent changes in both the markets we serve. We have a strong existing customer base and good opportunity to expand both the depth and breadth within these customers, as well as creating opportunities with new customers in both businesses. “

Additionally, although Xyratex does not seem to see any risk to their business due to NetApp’s switching to their own newly acquired hardware division, I suggest they review the history of NetApp and Eurologic.

Will NetApp consider an outside hardware supplier a better and more affordable solution than an internal hardware supplier? It will be interesting to watch what happens. I would imagine that the internal supplier division would have an edge in negotiations.