Zerowait Corporation

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

I returned from a week in the UK where I was visiting customers. The response I got to our SimplStor product with its single name space storage switch was great. In Europe folks understand that they have to bend the cost curve of storage downward and it does not make sense to pay primary storage prices for secondary and tertiary storage assets.

That is why the storage load balancer makes so much sense. It allows you to automatically migrate data between nodes based on usage and behaviors that you determine are important. For example, highly used and accessed data can stay on high performance expensive OEM arrays and low access or archive data can migrate over to affordable arrays.

This study from a couple of years ago still resonates with our customers today:

During the three-month period that the network was under scrutiny, more than 90 percent of the material on the servers was never accessed. The researchers captured packets encoded using the Common Internet File System protocol, which Microsoft Windows applications use to save data via a network. About 1.5T of data was transferred.

“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.’

Moreover, among the files that were opened, 65 percent were only opened once. And most of the rest were opened five or fewer times, though about a dozen files were open 100,000 times or more.

Give us a call or send us an email if you would like to set up a webinar on how SimplStor can save your organization a lot of money on your storage acquisitions and ongoing support costs.

Wilmington, DE (Vocus) September 1, 2010

Providing television viewers with up to the minute news is a high availability, storage intensive operation. Many media companies around the world depend on NetApp Filers for the storage of video feeds and other files required for video production and broadcasting. Sarasota’s SNN Local News 6, one of the first all digital-disk based television stations, has depended on NetApp equipment since 2005. When they had a recent storage problem with their NetApp R200 they called Zerowait to fix the problems and to purchase an additional off lease NetApp FAS3020 Filer with transferable licenses.

Zerowait President Mike Linett says: ’SNN Local News 6 called in with a Filer down emergency and asked our engineering staff to help them get up and running again as soon as possible. Our engineers immediately got to work. We had to troubleshoot their issues and overnight them parts, and we quickly got them on air again’. Craig Burdick, SNN Local News 6 operations manager said “As soon as we started talking to the engineers at Zerowait I knew we were in good hands.” Burdick continued, ”Zerowait solved our emergency, streamlined our storage, and improved our overall storage and back up methodology.”

The storage upgrade will allow SNN6 to provide their viewers with the outstanding local and live news their viewers have grown to expect. “We appreciate the excellent work the Zerowait staff provided SNN Local News 6, including immediate follow through and creative, resourceful attention to our priorities.” Said Linda DesMarais, SNN6 EVP and General Manager. Zerowait provides hundreds of clients around the world with 24/7 post warranty service and support using their ZHA Exception Reporter monitoring program. Mike Linett concludes: ’Zerowait has built its reputation by providing high availability post warranty service and support for NetApp Filers around the world for over 10 years. It is a pleasure to add SNN6 to our family of satisfied customers.’

About Zerowait Corp. 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 SNN Local News 6. Launched in 1995 as a unit of the Sarasota Herald Tribune and the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, SNN Local News 6 was purchased by a group of local investors in 2009. The 24-hour local news channel serves more than 200,000 Comcast cable subscribers in Sarasota, Charlotte, Manatee and DeSoto Counties.

Manchester, UK (Vocus) August 25, 2010

Over the last decade, Zerowait has worked with many of NetApp’s largest customers to reduce their costs of storage. During the Financial Panic of 2008 and 2009 some of these customers asked Zerowait to develop an affordable Petabyte storage solution offering Single Namespace support.

Mike Linett, President of Zerowait said, ‘Our customers have guided the development of this product from the beginning. The idea of an affordable Petabyte originated with one of our large scientific customers, and the need was confirmed by several of our well known animation customers. We’re confident our clients will find SimplStor a reliable, cost effective solution for large volume secondary storage.’

Storage industry analysts are taking notice. ‘Zerowait is out in front of a nagging set of trends, regulatory and economic, that see companies searching for an effective method for storing large quantities of file based data for many years,’ says Jon Toigo, noted tech industry watchdog and consumer ombudsman and CEO of Toigo Partners International. “Zerowait SimplStor is truly customer driven and tuned, both in terms of cost of ownership and capacity, to what businesses need today to cope with the data deluge.”

Farat Buta, Director of European Operations says, ‘Our customers have been asking us when we would be providing the affordable SimplStor Petabyte product in Europe. We pushed to introduce it in September as this is when many of our customers are finalizing their budgets’. When asked about the cost of a Petabyte of storage Mr. Buta said, “SimplStor’s price point is significantly lower than the competition and provides our customers with a reliable, cost effective replacement for their tape archives.”

Mr. Buta continued, ‘Our customers require enterprise level service and support, and insisted that we integrate an automated support solution into the SimplStor product line. SimplSupport met or exceeded their expectations’. Mr. Buta added, ‘SimplStor is a Single Namespace Petabyte storage solution with a price point that competes with cloud archive solutions without the security issues of an outsourced solution.’

‘The response to our SimplStor Petabyte has been extremely strong, and during the week of August 30th, 2010 we will be meeting with a number of customers in the UK to finalize their configurations and delivery schedules.’ said Michael Linett

About Zerowait Corporation: Headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware (USA), Zerowait is internationally recognized for honesty, integrity and expertise in third-party, high-availability NetApp data storage and support solutions. 302.996.9408

For more info on our UK and European services contact Farat Buta – Manchester, UK – (+44) (0) 800.0121.801