Data Growth doesn’t have to take you broke


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.

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Data Growth is a hot topic again

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.

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Zerowait Opens Texas Office

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

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Storage users in the UK understand

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.

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Zerowait’s NetApp Support Helps Keep SNN6 Local News 6 on the Air

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.

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UK NEWS – Zerowait Introduces SimplStor Petabyte with Single Namespace for Less than £250,000

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

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Business is improving at Zerowait

While the overall US economy seems to be stuck in a sort of malaise, Zerowait’s business is growing nicely. The number of new customers we have gotten this year, as well as the overall increase in business has us looking at opening new locations and adding additional staff and warehouse space.

The uncertainty of the business and tax environment is causing many companies to embrace our independent NetApp support, and our SimplStor product line is flourishing. I am often asked ” which business sectors are growing fastest for Zerowait?” I explain that our customers are not concentrated in any vertical market, but seem to be in the horizontal marketplace of high availability storage and are looking for ways to lower their costs of storage acquisition and maintenance.

It seems that our new customers are primarily looking for value and reliability, and we seem to be fulfilling these requirements for more and larger customers and installations. In uncertain times, we provide an affordable security blanket for many companies.

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Zerowait UK

Zerowait Supports NetApp Infrastructure in United Kingdom

Zerowait Corporation, a data-storage service company, boasts an international reputation for providing NetApp customers with an affordable solution for maintaining their legacy high-availability storage hardware.

Quote startWe enjoy working with Imagination whenever we canQuote end

Newark, DE (PRWEB) July 21, 2010

Over the last few years, Zerowait has worked with Imagination Technologies, located in Hertfordshire, UK, to provide affordable storage and support for its NetApp infrastructure.

“Zerowait has helped us reduce our storage costs substantially. Their engineering staff have always been honest and forthright and have provided us with excellent solutions for Imagination’s demanding IT infrastructure,” says John Metcalfe, COO of Imagination Technologies.

“We’re migrating to a mixed data-storage environment, and I look forward to Zerowait continuing to provide us with excellent service and support for our NetApp infrastructure,” adds Metcalfe.

“We enjoy working with Imagination whenever we can,” says Zerowait UK managing director Farat Buta. “Their engineering team always pushes the envelope, and Zerowait’s engineers like the creativity that their solutions require,” he says.

Zerowait provides affordable parts, service and support for customers throughout Europe and is anticipating an increased global demand for their third-party NetApp service and support business.

“Zerowait is continually investing in engineering, technology and operations,” says Zerowait chief executive Mike Linett. “We are focused on providing our customers the best service and support possible. Our goal is total customer satisfaction,” says 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. Zerowait’s experience, knowledge and focus provide unparalleled service to its worldwide customer base. For more information, visit www.zerowait.com.

For more info on our UK and European services contact Farat Buta – Manchester ,UK uksales@zerowait.com – 44 0 161 737 0303

To preview and request product sales and hardware specifications, log on to the Zerowait Online Store at www.thezerowaitstore.com.

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The effect of business uncertainty

Over the last few weeks I traveled across the USA visiting several clients of ours. Many of the clients told me how tight their budgets were and blamed it on the uncertainty facing their business sector. In particular the medical and natural resources customers I met with were very concerned about the next 12 months.

Over dinner in Dallas with several clients I heard how our customers are planning how to remain profitable when gross revenue is down 10% in 2011. Additionally, they expect the cost of medical insurance and taxes to increase by about 10% in 2011. These folks are planning to remain profitable in a dismal business environment and that takes a lot of creativity and out of the box thinking.

Our typical customer is increasing their usage of our independent NetApp service and support and increasing the life cycle of their NetApp storage equipment. They expect that will reduce their costs of storage and support by 30% next year. So, even if their budget declines they will be able to maintain their QoS.

Thomas Sowell seems to have also noticed the issue: (http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=540126&p=2):

When you hire somebody in this environment, you know what you have agreed to pay them and what additional costs there may be for their health insurance or other benefits. But you have no way of knowing what additional costs the politicians in Washington are going to impose, when they are constantly coming up with new bright ideas for imposing more mandates on business.

One of the little-noticed signs of what is going on has been the increase in the employment of temporary workers. Businesses have been increasingly meeting their need for labor by hiring temporary workers and working their existing employees overtime, instead of hiring new people.

Why? Because temporary workers usually don’t get health insurance or other benefits, and working existing employees overtime doesn’t add to the cost of their benefits.

Rational business executives are desperately looking for cost reductions as a business survival strategy, but they need to reduce costs without increasing risk. Zerowait’s products, services and support are viewed as part of a solution in an uncertain business environment thanks to our staff’s reputation for high availability service and support. Over the last couple of months requests from customers for our help in NetApp migrations and implementations has increased as companies hesitancy to hire full time engineers increases. Viewed in this light the increase in Zerowait’s business this year makes a lot of sense.

If your storage budget is getting squeezed, maybe it is time to call Zerowait .

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Zerowait in the News

Jul 07, 2010 – With an expanding international client base specializing in the Digital Effects industry, Zerowait provided Fuel VFX with a cost-effective storage solution that satisfied their timeframe and budget. “Zerowait engineers worked closely with Fuel VFX and together deployed equipment and personnel to successfully complete the project.” says Zerowait chief executive Mike Linett.

Established in 2000, Fuel VFX has worked on a number of blockbuster movies including Iron Man 2, Wolverine and Bedtime Stories. With an immediate need to add 20 terabytes of storage to their system and an increase in overall performance, Dylan Penhale, IT Manager, Fuel VFX contacted Zerowait to execute the install. “From the first meeting, through post installation, they didn’t miss a beat. Zerowait was prepared to meet our demanding schedule and even flew an engineer out to assist us.” added Penhale.

Zerowait’s Australian NetApp business has recently seen a strong upward trend in the configuration and deployment of complex NetApp storage systems. Zerowait’s Exception Reporter enables Zerowait’s customers to easily monitor their NetApp Filer performance and capacity, which helps them optimize their storage infrastructure. “Zerowait’s Australian business is growing rapidly, and we are working toward establishing a service and support facility in the Sydney area similar to our European office in Manchester, UK.” adds Linett.

“Zerowait was prepared to meet our demanding schedule. For us, there simply isn’t a better value way to get high-end filers onto our network. I certainly will recommend Zerowait to our peers in the Digital Effects industry.” says Penhale.

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. Zerowait’s experience, knowledge and focus provide an unparalleled service to their worldwide customer base. For more information, visit www.zerowait.com.

To preview and request product sales and hardware specifications, log on to the Zerowait Online Store at www.thezerowaitstore.com.

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