Zerowait Corporation

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.

Today I saw an article by Victoria Barret in Forbes in which Dave Hitz is quoted as saying:

“Outsourcing has to provide the same service as you could do in-house 20% cheaper. So 10% of that comes from cost savings the outsourcer generates and the other 10% is their margin. That sounds like a horrible business to me. Yes, telecos are already in this business and there will be big winners and some craters.”

Margins are tight in many business markets, but our customers in the cloud storage business have found that by using a mix of Zerowait’s legacy support services and NetApp off lease transferable licensed equipment they can increase their ROI substantially.

Zerowait’s Low-Cost Support for NetApp Systems Delivers Economical High-Availability Storage Solutions to Oracle User Community

Independent Support Provider to Exhibit at RMOUG Training Days in Denver

Wilmington, DE (Vocus/PRWEB) February 11, 2011

Zerowait Corporation, the leading provider of independent NetApp support and off-lease systems, will be exhibiting at the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) Training Days, Feb. 15-17. RMOUG is the largest regional user group conference in the US.

“Many Oracle users have chosen NetApp as their storage platform but, given today’s conservative economy, are looking to get more from their storage budgets, ”said Rob Robinson, vice president of sales for Zerowait. “Our-post warranty support programs allow clients to cost-effectively extend the life of their NetApp storage investments — often doubling their projected ROI. NetApp off-lease transferable license systems offer the same award-winning technology at half the price, enabling our clients to stretch their storage dollars without giving up the features and reliability that brought them to NetApp to begin with.”

“At RMOUG, we’ll highlight our SimplStor archive products, which offer highly dense and reliable disk-based storage,” said Mike Linett, Zerowait president. “With up to 90 terabytes in a 4U package, we can provide a petabyte of single-name space storage in less than two standard racks. At less than $350,000 a petabyte, including one year of next business day support, Zerowait provides a near-line solution for less than the cost of tape. Our clients tell us they simply can’t continue to pay tier-one prices for tier-two and disaster-recovery applications, and that SimplStor offers the reliability and support they need – at a price they can afford.”

Booth 17
Zerowait will be in booth space 17, with company representatives available to discuss with attendees how they can get the most from their storage budgets. For those unable to attend Training Days, Zerowait is offering a 10 percent discount to new customers on NetApp parts, service and support. Please click here and enter your contact information to register, then the 10 percent discount will apply to your first purchase within 90 days of registration.

For more information on Zerowait products and service, please go to http://www.zerowait.com/index.php/zerowait-solutions.

For more information on RMOUG Training Days, please go to http://www.rmoug.org.

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.

The NetApp DS14 MK2 was a very popular product and we support them all around the world. With NetApp terminating support of their MK2’s we have received many requests from new customers to continue hardware support on them.

As regular readers know we have a new office in Australia. We have been working on building our stocking levels there to provide our expanding Australian customer base the service and support they need to maintain their legacy NetApp and IBM N-series equipment. Pallets of equipment have been shipped over the last few weeks to our office and things are coming together very nicely.

With the Australian dollar and American dollar essentially in parity, the cost for Zerowait’s legacy NetApp support in Australia has gotten very attractive to many more of NetApp’s customers there.

Our Australian contact information is below:

Zerowait Australia
Unit 7 18-20 Hotham Parade
Artarmon, NSW 2064
Australia
Sales: +61 2 9966 0466
Fax: +61 2 9966 0488

Email: ausales@zerowait.com

The mission of Zerowait is to help our customers achieve their goals. We listened to what they told us and created a printed price sheet for legacy NetApp support. If you want a copy simply email us at: sales@zerowait.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we will mail you one.

We will also have them at the Rocky Mountain Oracle User Group meeting next week. We hope to see you there.