Zerowait Corporation

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.

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?