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.
This week I am in the UK working with a few customers around London and our office in Manchester. There is a lot of interest here in our SimplStor product as an alternative to NetApp and IBM N Series for secondary storage and Archiving. And that is not surprising considering this article:
” How Companies Are Managing The Data Tsunami
By KEVIN HARLIN, INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY Posted 02/25/2011 02:55 PM ET”
“It would have cost a company about $1.7 million last year to buy the hardware and equipment necessary to store 1 petabyte of data — roughly enough to store the entire collection of the Library Of Congress several times over.
That’s not very expensive, really, to store 1 quadrillion bytes — a numeral 1, with 15 zeros after it.
The real challenge is managing that data deluge. That’s sparking massive investor interest in the cloud computing and data storage space, as well as a slew of mergers and acquisitions.”
A Petabyte of SimplStor including Single Namespace sells for under $350,000 with support and it fits in a single rack. And Zerowait SimplStor customers don’t have the security issues related to cloud computing. It makes a great alternative to archiving.
What could your company do with a spare Million Dollars?
Over the last few weeks we have experienced a steady increase in customer requests due to NetApp’s continuing supply problems. Typically, a tight supply leads to an increase in the cost of products and I would expect that NetApp would raise their prices to alleviate their delivery issues. I can’t say whether they are using their pricing to solve their delivery problems or not. It could be that competitive pressures from EMC, Dell and others are preventing NetApp from raising their costs on new product sales.
From the news reports I have read, I can’t tell which components are causing their delivery bottlenecks. If NetApp has only a single supplier for their products, they probably have very little leverage with their supplier to increase production. Unless they represent an extremely large percentage of their supplier’s sales they can’t do much to increase deliveries. If they have only one supplier for their new FAS3200 product, they don’t have a competitive supplier they can ramp up. In this situation, demand will outstrip supply and that looks like what is happening
“Paul Hickingbotham, solutions manager at NetApp distributor Hammer, said the firm has experienced delays in getting hold of the FAS3200 kit in recent weeks.
“There have been some delays in fulfilment of deals [but] most customers are prepared to wait,” said Hickingbotham. “And with demand being so high, this is a positive thing.”
Matt Earle, NetApp business manager at distributor Avnet, said the delays were not harming business.
He said: “Any delays being experienced are not impacting orders which I believe is testament to the quality and popularity of the products.”
Zerowait’s orders are up this year, and I think it might have something to do with NetApp’s supply issues. I am traveling to the UK next week to visit with several of our NetApp customers, and also several new prospects. Additionally, one of our Senior Engineers from the USA is working with our Australian team next week visiting several clients and prospects in Australia.
NetApp makes great products, and their superseded equipment can remain in service for quite a long time when clients use Zerowait for their service and support on the legacy equipment. If you are looking for an alternative to upgrading, or would like a competitive quote for your Filer support, I hope you will consider our alternative support solutions.
Over the last few weeks we had heard rumors that NetApp was having supply problems from our customers that were asking us for quotes on additional storage for their systems. It seems that the rumors were based on good information.
Late Wednesday, NetApp reported its fiscal third-quarter earnings jumped 60%, but revenue was hurt by component shortages. The company sees the problem continuing in the current quarter as it issued a fiscal fourth-quarter profit outlook that fell below analysts’ projections, according to Thomson Reuters.
If your company is looking for additional NetApp Storage Zerowait has plenty in stock at very reasonable prices .
Don’t let a balky supply chain hold up your storage projects.
