Zerowait Corporation

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.

One of our long time customers stopped by our booth to discuss his plans to retire his F840 and upgrade to a FAs960. They also are a SimplStor user and really like the product.

SimplStor reduces high availability storage costs; petabyte unit at $300k fits the bill, beats NetApp prices by 5 to 1

Wilmington, DE (Vocus) October 13, 2010

A brand new approach to secondary storage is to be launched at Society of Exploration Geophysicists’ (SEG) annual meeting in Denver October 17-20, 2010. The brainchild of Delaware storage service company, Zerowait, SimplStor was the result of numerous requests from clients who wanted a secondary storage solution with no irrelevant extras.

Said Zerowait’s founder and President, Michael Linett, ‘We were always being asked by customers why their NetApp equipment had to have so many bells and whistles when they weren’t needed for archiving, and could we build something that would fit the bill. So we set about sourcing the parts, designing the architecture and writing the utilities. After more than a year of building and testing, SimplStor is the result. By starting with a clean sheet of paper our engineering staff came up with some bonuses for our customers. First, we were able to fit a Petabyte in only 52 U, and secondly we can address a Petabyte with a Single namespace.’

Rob Robinson, Zerowait’s Vice President of Sales, said the value Zerowait engineers generated surpassed customers’ expectations. ‘Fact is, our customers are telling us that they’ve been quoted up to five times the $300,000 price for 1 petabyte with single namespace. The closest offer was still four times the cost of SimplStor.’

Rick Bogehold, President of Excel Geo , Denver Colorado, added: “Zerowait’s SimplStor Petabyte storage product has provided a realistic option for customers like us looking for an affordable single namespace archiving solution from a company whose commitment to customer support we can trust.”

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 their skyrocketing costs of data storage. www.zerowait.com.

About Excel Geophysical: Excel Geophysical Services is a specialist seismic data processing company headquartered in Greenwood Village, Colorado with a satellite office in Wellington, New Zealand. Our staff presents over 300 years of combined experience in enhancement of seismic data for hydrocarbon exploration, as well as highly regarded capabilities in the application of reflection seismic to geotechnical and minerals evaluation. Our portfolio of successful projects covers tens of thousands of 2D line miles, and hundreds of 3D surveys covering scales of acres to hundreds of square miles. www.excelgeo.com

I spent most of this week visiting our customers in Dallas and Houston. The folks in Texas certainly understand that their storage assets are costing them a lot of money and eating up their budgets pretty quick. We had a real interesting meeting in Houston with a large NetApp user, who is looking at any and all alternatives to OEM support. They have no budget for forced upgrades to 3170’s or 6080’s and Zerowait was recommended to them for their post warranty support.

Like so many customers of ours these folks really like our SimplStor Petabyte with its single NameSpace, and included 3 year support. We will be seeing many of our Texas customers again at the SEG show in Denver during the week of 10/17/2010, we will be in booth 2513.

By the way, if you like BBQ and are in the Dallas area I suggest you go to North Main BBQ

Data Modeling Inc. Selects Zerowait to Assist with Data Expansion

Purchases Off – Lease NetApp System to Expand Storage Infrastructure

Calgary, Alberta Canada (Vocus) October 5, 2010

Data Modeling , a leader in the seismic imaging industry, recently purchased an off – lease NetApp FAS3050 system with transferable licenses from Zerowait when it needed to expand its storage capacity. Kerry Stinson, President of DMI said: “Zerowait has done an excellent job of maintaining our current NetApp system while keeping expenses under control.” He continued, ‘When it came time to expand our storage due to increasing demand for our service, it made sense to see if they could save us even more with the purchase of an off – lease system. The system we purchased has the performance and storage capacity we need, while saving us well over 50% compared to buying new.’

‘Whether it’s a complete system, add on storage, or support for legacy systems, Zerowait offers a real alternative to the expensive OEM solution. We have the expertise and the inventory to help NetApp users get the maximum ROI out of their investment,’ added Rob Robinson, Vice President of Sales for Zerowait.

Mike Linett, President of Zerowait continued: ‘Our new SimplStor product line can save customers even more when implementing Tier 2 storage. With 3 years of SimplSupport and Single Namespace, 1 petabyte of SimplStor costs less than $300,000. Now our clients have even more options as they build out their storage infrastructure, and our engineers can offer more ways to help them meet both their performance and budget requirements.’

Added Mr. Stinson: ‘Zerowait has shown that they are serious about helping us to save on our IT requirements. As we continue to expand we’ll definitely investigate SimplStor as a way to further drive down the cost of ever expanding storage requirements.’

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 their skyrocketing costs of data storage. www.zerowait.com.

Since we announced our Simplstor Petabyte solution a lot of folks have been calling and emailing us to learn more about the product. While many of our competitors charge over $1,000,000 for their 1PB secondary and archive storage solutions, the SimplStor PB, including the single namespace switch is under $300,000.00 . Some customers have told us that with our 60 month financing Simplstor PB will cost less than some well known cloud storage providers have quoted them.

One analyst recently was quoted as saying “We estimate organizations will archive over 500,000PB of data in the next five years,” said Brian Babineau, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. “

If you think SimplStor PB is worth investigating for your organization, please give us call and we can set up a webinar for your engineering staff.

Over the weekend I read an article in Investors Business Daily which was talking about the growth of data. It was on Page A10 of the September 26th issue.

“Firms Ride Data Explosion
By BRIAN DEAGON, INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 09/24/2010 05:31 PM ET
The amount of all digital data created last year, if put on DVDs and
stacked, would reach all the way to the moon and back.
The data would tally up to 800,000 petabytes, with each petabyte equal
to a million gigabytes, up 62% from the prior year. That’s according to a
study by research firm IDC, with funding from storage giant EMC (EMC).”

“In the market for external disk storage systems made by vendors such as EMC and NetApp, global sales in the second quarter rose 20.4%
from a year earlier to $5 billion.
“That’s very good growth,” said Liz Conner, an analyst at research firm IDC. From 2005 to 2009, a typical quarter would show growth below
10%.
The Q2 growth was based on a weak sales period the year before, but the trend still looks good.
“Technology budgets are loosening up,” Conner said. The ever-increasing growth in digital data will support demand for storage systems in
good times or bad.
“Everybody is keeping just about everything they create now,” she said.
• Upside: With digital data reaching skyward and the move toward cloud computing and virtualization now getting strong, demand for storage
products and systems has held up even in difficult economic times.”

Many firms that want to control storage acquisition and support costs are already customers of Zerowait.Our new SimplStor Petabyte is gaining a lot of attention from companies looking to control their costs as their archives grow. We will be introducing the product at booth 2513 during thee SEG show in Denver on October 17th.

Wilmington, DE (Vocus) September 15, 2010

Zerowait, the leader in independent NetApp sales and support, is opening a Dallas, TX office to provide local support for its NetApp and SimplStor Petabyte customers. Mark McCaa, a long time Zerowait customer in the Dallas area, will be the manager of the Texas office, according to Rob Robinson, Vice President of Sales. ‘Mark has been a reference customer of ours for many years and knows our products and services well. Add to that his many years of experience in IT support in the Texas area, and we have a great addition to the Zerowait team.’

When asked why they are expanding when so many companies are experiencing a downturn, Zerowait President Mike Linett replied: ‘Sometimes serendipity plays a part in business success. Our business has grown strongly this year as companies look for more cost effective IT solutions. When we looked at our Texas business, both the amount of NetApp Support and the strong interest in our SimplStor Petabyte solution, and found Mark McCaa was ready to join our team, it just made sense to open the office in Texas.’ Mark McCaa added: ‘During my 4.5 years working with Zerowait as a vendor, I learned that I could depend on their honesty and dependability in our most critical data infrastructure support issues. During that time we never received a DOA part, saw their engineers recover data we were sure was lost, and recognized tremendous savings on our NetApp support. And from meeting other current Zerowait customers, I found an enthusiasm for Zerowait support I have not experienced before in my 35+ year career in hardware computer services and sales. It was easy to make the decision to join the Zerowait team.’

Mark McCaa continued: ‘In these tough economic times, Zerowait’s affordable SimplStor Petabyte solution is a great fit for the local Oil and Gas industry. I’m looking forward to meeting new clients and bringing the message of Zerowait services and products so they too can experience what I have in working with this fine organization.’ In closing, Mr. McCaa said “I know from experience that Zerowait makes high availability storage and support affordable , from the smallest NetApp Filer to the SimplStor Petabyte archive. “

About Zerowait Corp: Headquartered in Wilmington, DE., Zerowait provides post warranty support for NetApp products around the world. SimplStor PB is the affordable single namespace solution to control the skyrocketing costs of data storage. Learn more at www.zerowait.com