Zerowait Corporation

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.

We have received tremendous interest in our Free Exception Reporter over the last few days and a lot of folks have signed up for the service. A longtime customer and friend of ours suggested that we record a short video on the service to help explain it to folks in the NetApp community that are unfamiliar with Exception Reporter.

Here is the link

Zerowait Introduces Free Exception Reporter for NetApp Filers

Analysis Tool Generates Simple, Concise Reports on Data, Capacity, Components

Our business has grown dramatically and expanded into international markets due in no small part to our paying close attention to the evolving needs of the NetApp community

Wilmington, DE (Vocus/PRWEB) April 04, 2011

Zerowait Corporation, the leading provider of independent NetApp support and off-lease systems, today announced its Free Exception Reporter for NetApp filer storage systems. The analysis tool, borne of Zerowait customers’ growing need for a unified reporting solution, provides cost-free “translations” of filers’ auto-support data into concise, easily understood reports that help users optimize management of their NetApp filers’ data, capacity and components.

Zerowait created its original Exception Reporter years ago to both alert Zerowait engineers and notify its clients of any technical issues with their filers and assist them in interpreting their weekly logs. Many NetApp users have mixed service and support environments, in which NetApp supports some filers while Zerowait supports others. Now anyone in the NetApp community can send the weekly logs from their NetApp-supported filers to Free Exception Reporter and receive the same easy to read report.

“Our business has grown dramatically and expanded into international markets due in no small part to our paying close attention to the evolving needs of the NetApp community,” said Laurence Jones, Managing Director of Zerowait Australia. “Providing them with Free Exception Reporter reflects that we listen and respond to their requests, and remain committed to providing the most cost-effective support for their NetApp filers.”

“This powerful yet efficient analysis tool is easy to set up; just follow the simple instructions on our Free Exception Reporter webpage,” added David Benner, Engineering Manager at Zerowait. “Once users enroll they’ll receive a weekly email with the Free Exception Reporter analysis of their filers.”

For more information and to register for Free Exception Reporter, go to http://www.zerowait.com/index.php/zerowait-solutions/exception-reporter.

Zerowait has offices located in its Delaware headquarters, the United Kingdom and its recently opened facility in Australia. The company’s expansion and dramatic revenue growth in 2010 is attributed to its cost-effective service of post warranty NetApp storage systems, as well as the SimplStor family of integrated storage solutions, which dramatically reduce the acquisition costs of archive storage and virtually eliminate the licensing costs associated with most other archive storage solutions.

About Zerowait
Headquartered in Wilmington, Del., USA, and with offices around the world, Zerowait is the worldwide leader in independent service and support of NetApp filers. Zerowait solutions include off-lease fully licensed NetApp systems and the new Zerowait SimplStor line of single-name space archive storage. Storage administrators throughout the world rely on Zerowait to provide affordable solutions to the skyrocketing costs of data storage. http://www.zerowait.com

Over the last several weeks I have heard from various customers that NetApp is having a hard time meeting delivery schedules for FAS 3200’s and FAS 6200’s. This has been good for Zerowait’s business since many folks are deciding to increase their storage with equipment from Zerowait which we have in stock.

Additionally, many NetApp customers who are looking for lower cost NetApp solutions that are 64 bit have been asking about the availability of Transferable Licensed 3040’s and FAS3070’s. There are plenty available now and these can certainly help customers who are upgrading get the hardware they need at an affordable price which will run version 8 and above of OnTap.

Over the last several years, as NetApp’s 4th quarter came to an end their customers were able to negotiate better deals on equipment purchases. But with tight supplies NetApp’s sales teams may be be willing to provide hardware upgrades at better prices on equipment that they can deliver by end of quarter. Tight supplies and End of Fiscal Year pressures may combine to create some interesting buying opportunities for NetApp’s customers.

We have had a great 1st quarter and look forward to continued growth this year as the worldwide community of Zerowait customers continues to grow. The sales team at Zerowait has been traveling extensively over the last several months as interest in our affordable NetApp Support gains more customers. And over the next several months we expect this to continue.

Last week I was talking to a client and he was asking me why his data storage vendor wants to make it harder for him to access and maintain his data. It was an interesting conversation because I had never looked at the paradigm from that perspective.

In most businesses your vendor wants you to succeed and wants your company to grow and they do that by making their products and services more convenient. But in the Storage business the vendors who create proprietary operating systems and file systems want to rapidly End of Life (EOL) equipment and constantly create software upgrades to maintain their income stream, potentially preventing you from accessing your data as it is currently configured.

I am not a Luddite, but I am not in favor of my vendor partners locking me into their upgrade cycle. Once I purchase a piece of equipment or hardware I want to be able to maintain it a long time, and if it is a piece of equipment that has our company’s data on it I want to be able to continue to access it.

Last week in Computer Reseller News, a NetApp executive was quoted as saying:

“We are in a very good margin position with our partners, compared with our competitors,” said Parrish. “But the danger is if you over-recruit, you over-distribute the product and that is the number-one cause of margin erosion.”

“Instead, the priority for NetApp is working with its existing partners to trap more mid-market business.”

(http://www.channelweb.co.uk/print_article/crn-uk/news/2035448/netapp-offers-partners-margin-protection)

As a business owner I don’t want to be trapped by my vendors into making deals, the main purpose of which is to make them great margins. I want my vendors to work with us on our long-term business growth, not tomorrow’s or this financial quarter’s. Our customers purchased High Availability Storage equipment from NetApp and they don’t understand why they have to upgrade just because it is good for NetApp’s business. A business partnership should be beneficial to all, sellers and consumers, or it cannot continue for the long term. Since Zerowait’s goal is to maintain and support high availability storage equipment for the long-term, our business aligns with the needs of many customers because it helps them substantially reduce their costs of hardware manufacturer dictated upgrades and the expensive data migrations that result. Zerowait has very successfully been supporting customers around the world who are operating NetApp beyond the manufacturer’s recommended EOL.

Our NetApp support customers needed an advocate and an ally that understood that data access was critical, and that maintaining High Availability equipment to be reliable was the goal. But, maintaining software support from a vendor that wants to force you to upgrade is not easy and is often extraordinarily expensive.

This is an example of the kind of Vendor thinking that drove our customers to ask us to create SimplStor, an open source reliable enterprise storage solution. Business executives around the world have embraced Open Source Linux, BSD and many variants to be their front line web servers, and workstations, and even the biggest storage companies use Linux on their servers and equipment for the simple reason that is reliable and it is inexpensive. And most storage vendors have been using highly reliable Commodity Off The Shelf Technology (COTS) for years. NetApp is proud to say it uses it also:

NetApp is not only notching hefty sales (expected to hit $2 billion in fiscal 2006) but it has also managed to maintain sky-high 60%-plus gross margins, despite building its gear with commodity, off-the-shelf parts.

(http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051227_204146.htm)

Therefore, it seems odd that these same storage companies tell their customers that their proprietary systems are better and more cost-effective for all types of data. Zerowait’s customers know better. They understand that even their storage vendors’ studies show that most storage is not actually primary storage but is some sort of Secondary, Tertiary or Archival data.

“Compared to the full amount of allocated storage on the file servers, this represents only 10 percent of data,” Leung said. ‘[This] means that 90 percent of the data is untouched during this three-month period.”

(http://gcn.com/Articles/2008/07/01/Most-network-data-sits-untouched.aspx)

Zerowait’s customers know that high reliability storage does not have to be expensive; it just needs to be maintained and monitored to last a long time. And this does not have to cost a lot. The Big Boys of storage know this also. If they did not think Linux was reliable they would not be using it in their systems.

Zerowait’s savvy customers asked if we could build them a simple reliable storage system that uses the same O/S that the Big Storage guys use on their internal systems. We did what our customers asked and now Zerowait has added SimplStor to the high reliability storage systems and equipment we are building and maintaining around the world.

We are focused on providing our customers long term service and support for their data storage requirements. It seems our competitors are focused on their own short term margins. Which works better for you?

Over the last few weeks we have been working with a few international Fortune 500 customers on their NetApp service and support quotes. Now that we have our Australian operations set up we can provide these companies with affordable support around the world, and they are quickly recognizing how much they can save on their NetApp support by switching to Zerowait hardware support program.

What we are hearing is that a lot of companies are shocked at the cost of continuing support and the license fees that NetApp is charging them, and they no longer see the value. Most Storage is not primary storage, and while not everyone is embracing storage tiering , almost everyone recognizes that keeping Petabytes of archive storage on primary storage arrays is very expensive, and data migrations are not easy. But at some budgetary inflection point even the Fortune 500 companies are realizing it is time to change the paradigm. NetApp used to market itself as a disruptive technology, and their NAS solutions did change things quite a bit. But now many of our customers have over 100 filers, and they are feeling budgetary disruptions at renewal and upgrade time.

Our SimplStor is an evolutionary storage solution, based on best of breed commercial hardware. There is nothing disruptive about SimplStor except that we have driven down the price point to make storage affordable to our customers. Our customers need affordable storage that can grow to a Petabyte and beyond, and we provided them the solution they asked for.

Over the last several weeks we have received increasing interest in our SimplStor affordable storage as an excellent alternative for the CCTV market. At first we began by working with folks on hundreds of terabytes, and then we started to get requests for a couple of Petabyte solutions and now we are working with a prospect on an installation of over 30 Petabytes. Single name space on an affordable enterprise storage platform makes a very attractive package to a lot of organizations around the world.

Additionally, we are finding a lot of our customers are looking for an affordable Private Cloud Service Provider. Our friends at The New Push provide outstanding service and support, and since they use our platforms for storage we recommend them a lot : ) Contact the New Push here

Last week while I was in the UK I spoke to a few media folks about Zerowait and our services and support. Dave Simpson of InfoStor wrote this in his blog.

“What are your post-lease options?

March 4, 2011 – When your lease or warranty runs out (or even when you’re on lease or warranty), you have a number of options. You can undergo a total technology refresh and buy new systems from your primary storage supplier – an expensive option, and it’s likely that you don’t really need the latest and greatest gear. Or, you can re-up and sign an extended service-and-support agreement with your primary vendor – another expensive option.

Alternatively, you can contract with a third party that provides support for all kinds of IT hardware. But let’s say you’re a NetApp shop: What level of expertise does a general-purpose third party really have on NetApp systems?

A third alternative is to sign a services-and-support contract with a third party that specializes specifically in the type of hardware you have. In the case of NetApp systems, a good example is Zerowait.“

Dave’s article goes on to discuss the services and support for NetApp we provide as well as our SimplStor product by talking to one of our customers in Colorado.