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.
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.
