Zerowait Corporation

During 2010 Zerowait grew substantially thanks to our customers and their recommendations and referrals. In the next few weeks Zerowait is opening our office in Sydney, Australia to service our customers there.

Our business in the European Union has been growing strongly as folks look for more value and legacy service and support of their legacy NetApp equipment. London has been a fast growing market for us and we expect more growth in 2011.

Our Dallas Texas office is expanding and our new office will be open next week to service and support our fast growing Texas service and support business as well as our SimplStor customers in the area.

Throughout the USA our independent NetApp Service and Support has grown, our SimplStor product has been establishing itself as companies seek out an affordable and reliable secondary storage platform. We expect to see strong growth in our SimplStor product line in the data centers where we provide NetApp support now.

Smooth sailing 2010

At Zerowait we understand that customer and employee satisfaction are the keys to long term growth. Our aim when we started the company was to create an atmosphere that encouraged employee and customer loyalty, relying on the recommendations and referrals of our customers and business partners to facilitate our growth in a business that demands a sterling reputation.

Our customers and business partners know that they have a personal relationship with Zerowait’s staff, often telling us that it is the relationships they have with our employees that makes their jobs easier. We recognize that there are lots of competitors for our products and services, so we have built our business plan on truly partnering with our customers. Building trust relationships takes time, as partners must invest in their relationship to get the most out of it. Our multi faceted service business would not be successful if it was built on the economics of individual transactions. We recognize that our business growth is attributable to the time we devote to making our business personal.

Thanks to the loyalty of our customers and employees, we continue to grow, with 2010 our best year ever. To enable us to provide better service in Australia/Asia, we will be opening our Sydney, Australia office in 2011. Our Australian business has grown completely on the recommendations and referrals of our customers, and as we continue to expand our Australian/Asian presence we will continue to focus on relationship building to make certain our new customers, wherever they are located, recognize they are part of the Zerowait family.

Over the last week there have been some interesting articles on NetApp in the press. What drew my attention was the conflicting views in the articles. While the financial press seems to think there is a lot of growth potential in the company, the trade press has noticed that there seems to be a problem with the company’s selection of acquisition targets.

Forbes
“NetApp can benefit in multiple ways from demand for cloud services:

(1) Higher storage market share

NetApp has been helping companies evolve to a private cloud infrastructure since before the term cloud became popularized. NetApp private cloud solutions are based on its industry-leading data and storage management technology.

We believe NetApp’s share in storage market will rise as firms adopting Cloud Computing will increasingly turn towards NetApp, one of the pioneers of the industry with proven products and expertise, in order to effect a massive change in their IT infrastructure that will help them remain competitive.

(2) Higher software licenses and demand for consulting services

In addition to witnessing increasing hardware sales, NetApp will see a surge in software license and maintenance as well as support and consulting services revenues, which are dependant on hardware sales, given the newness of the technology provided.

We estimate there could be a upside of 20% upside to the Trefis price estimate for NetApp’s if its share in the storage market increases to 16% by 2017 as against our current estimate of 13%.”

On the other hand we have this from Network Computing.

“The end of Decru’s market life is also a commentary on NetApp’s ability to manage acquisitions. The truth is, some organizations are better at acquiring technologies and making them their own than others. Cisco’s leading position in the Ethernet switching business came through the acquisition of switch pioneer Kalpana, (along with a few competitors), and while most storage guys think of Clariion as a pure EMC product, it was initially developed down the road at Data General.

NetApp, on the other hand, has not managed to turn an acquisition into a successful product line. They’ve had what can, at best, be called modest success with Onaro’s SANscreen SAN management tools and the NearStore VTL product line derived from Alacritus’s technology. Topio’s continuous data protection for heterogeneous environments became NetApp’s ReplicatorX before the folks in the corner office decided to rename it, yet again, and kill it off. “

Zerowait’s service and support business for NetApp legacy equipment continues to grow strongly as NetApp’s customers seek an affordable. and reliable way to extend the lifespan of their primary storage hardware. Additionally, in 2010 our SimplStor product line gained a foothold in more data centers, as storage customers embrace the concept of commodity hardware with enterprise level high availability service and support for their secondary and archival storage. Our international customer base recognizes that Zerowait concentrates on what we do best – providing outstanding service and support.

I spent yesterday visiting customers in DC and Northern Virginia , and then went up to Baltimore to have dinner with another customer and friend. Our customers recognize that paying primary storage support prices for secondary and tertiary storage requirements is kind of crazy. Savvy customers also understand that upgrading secondary storage just because your OEM is upgrading their product line does not make financial sense. With budgets tight, our business continues to grow as customers look for a reliable , full service, enterprise storage support solution.

NewPush Selects Zerowait’s SimplStor Storage Controllers and Arrays for New, Low Cost, Off-Site and Disaster Recovery Storage Offering

Offers Private, Managed Storage for Less Than Public Cloud Pricing

Denver, CO (Vocus/PRWEB) December 09, 2010

NewPush announced today a new, low-cost, managed remote storage program ideal for those requiring over 100TB of storage. Balazs Nagy, Chief Architect at NewPush stated “Starting at only $75 per terabyte (TB) per month, this program includes all expenses – space, power, cooling, firewall, and bandwidth with 1 terabyte of transfer for each terabyte of storage. Zerowait SimplStor storage controllers and Arrays offer both low cost and high reliability – key requirements for our new program. Our larger customers have been looking for a cost effective alternative to public cloud storage. SimplStor allows us to provide private managed storage at prices that beat the public cloud offerings. And having worked with Zerowait for years for support of our NetApp products, we know we can depend on their high availability service to provide the uptime our clients demand. Because SimplStor is built on open technology, we can customize the SimplStor storage controllers with the right software tailored to specifically satisfy the most demanding customer needs.”

Mike Linett, President of Zerowait added: “We’re excited to be part of this new offering from NewPush. We’ve been working with them for a number of years, providing NetApp systems, architecture and support to help the growing NewPush SAN infrastructure. When NewPush moved into their new data center in Denver, they came to us with requirements for a new high capacity offering. We showed them how SimplStor met these requirements for reliability, density, and low cost of operation, allowing NewPush to offer the pricing needed to compete in this segment. We’re excited that we now have a partner we can refer our clients to when they would prefer to have storage as a utility expense, rather than a capital outlay.”

This new offering is scalable from 100TB to over 1PB, and offers the security of private storage vs. a public storage cloud. NewPush also offers remote management for clients that prefer, or need, to keep their data in house in addition to off-site storage starting at 1 TB. Zerowait, in addition to the SimplStor product line, offers NetApp hardware, systems with transferable licenses and post warranty support. Please contact the respective companies for further information.

About NewPush:
NewPush is a global Application and Data Warehouse Hosting Company with customers spread across three continents. Leveraging purpose-built infrastructure, NewPush delivers government organizations, public companies, and medium size businesses a comprehensive suite of solutions. Our engineers solve demanding customers’ requirements that are beyond the scope of traditional hosting providers. As a Zerowait and an IBM Business Partner, NewPush affords its customers technologies that enable faster time to market, increased performance, better value, and reliability. http://newpush.com

This week we visited quite a few of our NetApp support customers in the Dallas,TX area and we also discussed our SimplStor archive solution with them. It seems that a lot of folks understand that the expensive secret sauce that the big iron array folks are selling are a bit pricey for secondary storage architectures.

It was a great week in Dallas.

Zerowait’s Rapid Response to NetApp’s Product Revamp – Expanded Service, Lower Prices for Older Systems

As NetApp Revamps Majority of Product Line, Zerowait Assures Users of Ongoing Support for Older Systems

Wilmington, DE (Vocus) November 18, 2010

Zerowait has expanded its independent NetApp support program to include newer FAS3000 and FAS6000 systems and storage, even as they continue to reduce their support prices. The Zerowait Parts Assurance (ZPA) policy provides automated monitoring of System Autosupports, including weekly System Status Reports, through the Exception Reporter program, Next Business Day before return replacement of failed components, and 24/7 access to friendly, knowledgeable engineers.

Rob Robinson, Vice President of Sales, says, “Many NetApp customers are shocked when they get a quote from NetApp to continue the support of systems coming out of warranty.” He continued ‘NetApp’s goal is to get the customer to replace their current hardware by keeping support costs for older hardware very high, since they are a hardware sales company. The quality and performance of NetApp storage over the last 5 years has reached the point that most customers are very satisfied with their current systems, and would prefer to continue using them while saving the cost of upgrading. Extending the useful life of a system out to 5 or 6 years allows customers to get the maximum ROI on their storage investment.’

Mike Linett, Zerowait’s President, added, ‘Zerowait is a service company. Our goal is to help our customers get the best return on their NetApp investment. We can typically save the customer 40% – 50% on service, while providing the support and uptime they expect for high availability storage. Our large inventory of parts and Off Lease Systems ensures we have the parts to repair your systems, the shelves and drives to help you grow your system to meet growing storage demands, and complete systems with transferable licenses when your storage needs change or expand. We have customers who depend on 10 year old systems, and depend on Zerowait to keep them going. Whether you have an F330 or a FAS6080, we have the parts and expertise to ensure the uptime you expect from your systems.’

With offices in the US, Europe, and soon, Australia, Zerowait can provide support on a global basis. To arrange for a no obligation review of your system’s status and a support quote, please contact your local Zerowait office today.

About Zerowait:
Headquartered in Wilmington, DE USA; is the worldwide leader in independent service and support of NetApp filers. Zerowait solutions include off-lease fully licensed NetApp systems and the new 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.

This week I was in Australia visiting our customers and talking to them about our SimplStor product line. Our customers in Australia clearly understand that our products can save them a lot of money and one of them pointed me to an information week article that is worth reading. The article ends with this statement.

“Staying with the current paradigm is sustainable only until the unstoppable force of data growth runs smack into the immovable constraint of funding. What happens then? Our money is on the data. To stay competitive, companies of all sizes must explore creative, cost-effective storage alternatives.”

One customer said that using Zerowait for their NetApp Service and support has been great, and as they expand they really like the idea of SimplStor for their secondary storage solution. When combined with the storage switch which provides a single Namespace they get the high end storage they need and their price for disk stays very low. They really liked the idea of the starter kit we introduced this month, as it makes storage reliability both simple and affordable.

Many of our customers like to differentiate between competitors and peers. When we look at all the different hardware, services and support that Zerowait provides our customers around the world we find it hard to find any peers. We are keenly aware of our competitors though, and there are a few competitors in each part of our business. But we are unaware of any single company that provides all of the services that Zerowait does.

Many folks would say that EMC, NetApp and IBM are competitors, but they are not peers. They are very different companies and they each have many capabilities that their competition does not have. They are peers in some aspects of their businesses, and when there is a very similar offering from each of them a savvy customer will seek competitive bids. For instance the IBM N series and NetApp FAS series are essentially the same product, with slightly different bezels, stickers, and support models.

IBM, EMC, and NetApp are all customers of Seagate and Hitachi for disks. I am pretty confident that Seagate and Hitachi treat the big three slightly differently based on sales and profitability factors.

Our SimplStor product also uses drives from Seagate or Hitachi, and components from many of the same manufacturers that the big three use. However common the components we all use, we are not competitors.

When Zerowait was a NetApp reseller in the late 1990’s our focus was selling the F740 and F760 into the departmental storage niche market. That market niche was not being targeted by either EMC or IBM and so we were able to sell our customers NetApp filers without much competition.

In a similar way our SimplStor is a targeted and unique product. It is targeted towards our customers who need the reliability of name brand components, but want to avoid high priced proprietary software features and support pricing. One of our customers recently mentioned that our lease pricing is lower than the price he was quoted by a cloud service provider, and he did not have the security issues to deal with. At the SEG show in Denver a lot of folks were very interested in a Petabyte of storage that can fit in a single standard rack, and were surprised that we could offer it for $300,000.00 with a switch to provide a single Namespace, and support.

The way we look at our SimplStor product it is not a competitive product, but a complementary product to the big three’s offerings that can work well in mixed environments and reduce our customers’ costs substantially.

Zerowait’s Presentation at Alaska’s IT Expo Will Focus on Third Party Purchase and Support Options for NetApp Equipment and Affordable Storage Tiering Solutions

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Anchorage, AK (Vocus) October 27, 2010

Zerowait’s message of affordable alternatives for storage gathered momentum with natural resource companies using IBM, NetApp and EMC storage during last week’s SEG show in Denver. Zerowait’s presentation at the Alaska IT expo this week will highlight the savings available to government and education agencies when they take advantage of off-lease equipment, independent support, and storage tiering utilizing the inexpensive SimplStor archive storage line.

Zerowait’s Vice President of sales Rob Robinson said, “I am excited by the opportunity to present our solution set to the Alaskan storage community at the IT Expo. At the recent Society of Exploratory Geophysicists show in Denver, Zerowait’s affordable storage solutions were well received by the Oil and Gas industry, with its ever growing requirements for data and close ties to Alaska. Now Zerowait has the opportunity to offer the government and education agencies of Alaska these same strategies. By taking advantage of the savings offered by off lease equipment, independent support and data tiering, IT managers can get the most from impacted budgets.”

Said Mike Linett, Zerowait President, “Alaska’s natural resource companies recognize they require increasing amounts of storage for their seismic data analysis. Zerowait’s affordable off lease systems and support options provide NetApp users with an alternative to the manufacturer’s high cost solutions. When combined with Zerowait’s SimplStor archiving solutions, companies can realize savings of over one million dollars per petabyte of storage. Government and educational agencies face the same ever expanding storage requirements, usually with even more restricted budgets, and these strategies will help them deliver maximum return on the tax payer’s dollar.”

For companies and agencies that depend on NetApp storage, Zerowait provides a number of innovative solutions to help them control costs. Additionally, Zerowait’s SimplStor with storage load balancing provides a simple way to help companies affordably tier their storage resources by need. Using Zerowait’s storage support and SimplStor products data storage managers can easily and affordably support the fast growing data storage requirements of their companies and agencies.

About Zerowait:
Headquartered in Wilmington, DE USA; is the worldwide leader in independent service and support of NetApp filers. Storage administrators throughout the world rely on Zerowait to provide affordable solutions to the skyrocketing costs of data storage. www.zerowait.com.

During the SEG show we had a lot of traffic at our trade show booth. It was a great show as some of our old customers told their buddies to stop by our booth and we had a lot of good conversations with old friends and new. Oil and Gas exploration and the analysis that goes with finding new reservoirs takes a lot of storage, and with budgets getting tight a lot of folks were very interested in our affordable NetApp service and support options, and transferable licensed filers.

Our new SimplStor product line also received a lot of attention, and we were interviewed by one oil and gas journal about our new product.

It was a very good show for Zerowait, we will be at next year’s show in San Antonio.