Zerowait Corporation

It has been an exciting and busy couple of weeks since I returned from the trade show in Anchorage, AK. I met a lot of great folks while in Anchorage and we generated plenty of interest with our service and support offerings. I did not expect the show to be as well attended as it was and we are considering doing more of the Interface shows. The picture below is of our friend Jeremy Provencio in the Applied Microsystems trade show booth:

From May 10 through May 13 we are going to be at the EMC World show and while in Boston we will also be meeting with a number of our clients. If you are going to be at the EMC World show We have purchased a completely new trade show booth, and the graphics are amazing. Zerowait’s booth is 122, I hope you can stop by our booth. We will be right next to the Riverbed folks which is convenient, since many of our clients are also Riverbed customers.

Our customers convinced us there was an opportunity for a simple reliable storage solution. The last two years have been hard on everyone’s budget, and a number of our customers asked if we had a less expensive storage solution than their current systems. We were also hearing from clients that were building out very large secondary storage pools, and they told us they simply couldn’t afford the large array vendors’ hardware, and more important, software and support costs. We talked to clients for over 8 months, taking their suggestions back to our engineering staff. From there we went back to our customers to make sure we understood their opinions on what was important and to ask them what they would pay for the product. We found that the sweet spot for this storage solution was between 50 cents and 75 cents a GB with raw capacity of 24TB to 100TB.

Once we had all the data, our engineers went to work to design a product that would be reliable and provide the customers with the alert and monitoring notifications that they are used to from the big array companies. We built a number of prototype units for customers to test. From these evaluations we made improvements to better align our storage solution to their requirements. At every step we learned something new, which we passed back to our customers for opinions and feedback.

SimplStor meets the needs of many customers for low cost storage while providing the hardware support and life-cycle they have learned to expect from the big iron guys. And our SimplSupport provides customers the notifications they need to simplify monitoring and maintenance. One of our evaluators summarized the product as follows:

“Zerowait’s new SimplStor gives me tier 1 storage and support at tier 3 pricing – finally someone got it right.” Eff Norwood – Storage Architect

If you are interested in affordable enterprise storage please give us call. Phone 302 996 9408 – toll free 888.811.0808

Enterprise storage fads are often like weather vanes and can change direction as quickly as the wind. New theories, old software and overstretched hyperbole are often discussed in the media and at tradeshows simply to satisfy the marketing departments of the vendors who pay for the articles and venues. Finally, there seems to be an awakening within corporate America that enterprise storage is costing way too much money and resources to manage and maintain. The SAN NAS wars have been fought to a draw. The conclusion seems to be as simple as ”different strokes for different folks”. Today’s battle is for budgets and about cost control. Can today’s entrenched storage oligarchs adapt to the needs of the customers in this hyper-sensitive fiscal environment?

The debate has been fairly one sided until recently. The storage oligarchs have locked in users with their proprietary operating systems, and the tertiary vendors try to mimic the big players’ features while trying to lock in their customers with their own proprietary solutions. Although the terminology varies slightly, every vendor is pitching their own version of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

The storage oligarchs like to point out that the fear of lock-in is overblown. After all, they have studies which prove that their point of view is correct and backed by studies and reports from the best analysts money can buy. The oligarchs seemingly ignore the accumulating evidence which proves that end users are embracing open source solutions to cut their costs. Today, many customers look at proprietary software much like water pollution. Similar to pollution (which can be ignored when it starts from a low baseline), proprietary storage can end up creating an increasingly complex migration and clean up when the time eventually comes. It often seems that an oligarch’s sales team overlooks the myriad consequences of their own proprietary software policies, while highlighting how much their competitors solution can cost the customer.

I can’t tell you when the storage oligarchs will face a business decline, but there exists another path, one that empowers the end users by leveraging open source solutions. The assumption that all storage can be handled by one proprietary vendor ignores the fact that every organization has different types of storage throughout the organization. There is no predetermined optimum amount of enterprise storage any company must have within its organization. The forces of storage growth and decline are based on users and their needs within their environments. Draftsmen and Civil Engineers have much different needs for their storage resources than Radiology Technicians, Cartoonists and Animators. Storage growth is often the result of uncontrollable external forces. For storage administrators today there needs to be an option that allows them to harness the power of open source solutions which can provide the high availability that enterprise storage requires while addressing the strains on today’s budgets. Zerowait has answered this need with our SimplStor solution. After almost two decades in a bipolar world, storage administrators have a choice again. The market has accepted open source solutions for a variety of reasons. With this acceptance storage administrators have begun to embrace the power of Linux, Open Solaris and BSD to provide their storage networks with mass storage at an affordable price.

www.simplstor.com

Imagine if before you saved a PDF on your corporate storage a statement came up that said “This 500 meg file will cost you $1.00 to save on our corporate system.” Charging users for storage is something that is talked about often, but rarely put into place. Setting up the parameters for creating a system would not be that hard, budgets could be set by departments and per person. And there could be extra charges for saving files on based on different back up criteria. The program could also provide weekly, monthly and quarterly email to users suggesting which files had not been accessed since being saved and suggesting they might be ripe for deletion, but unless people are charged for their storage resource usage most would probably ignore the suggested deletions.

Implementing the program would be relatively trivial, but I imagine creating the charge back scheme would elicit howls from just about every department in an organization. Storage is viewed as a free resource by most corporate users, and like any free resource it is used inefficiently. However, as soon as users saw that they were running up against their hard budget end point, I’ll bet they would start deleting the unimportant jokes, presentations and copies of the garbage they are keeping on corporate spinning disks.

Until enterprise storage users are charged for their resource usage they will not have any economic reason to use storage efficiently. Although enterprise storage remains an expensive resource to purchase, manage and maintain by corporate IT staffs, it is viewed as free to end users. Since storage users are not using their storage resources economically or being charged for their usage, corporate IT storage will remain a cost center in the eyes of management.

In this environment, cost conscience corporations will be forced to impose budget constraints on the IT department’s storage acquisitions, service and support contracts. Since companies can’t go after the users of storage, they go after the suppliers. Today many companies are pushing for discounts from their primary storage suppliers, while others are looking for alternatives to the high cost of arrays and support that the major OEM’s are charging.

Zerowait does not have a toll based solution for charging corporate storage resource users, but we do have a variety of solutions for helping storage IT save money on hardware, service and support. In addition to our legacy hardware support business we are introducing a new storage solution which changes the dynamics of enterprise storage costs. Zerowait’s SimplStor product line was designed with input from our customers to help them reduce their storage expenditures. When viewed together, Zerowait’s legacy support and SimplStor are an economical solution for the acquisition and maintenance of our customers’ storage resources.

Last week I was in Texas visiting clients and working with them to solve their enterprise storage management problems. I really enjoyed working with my clients, many of them said that our products and pricing were right on target and that they would be pulling the trigger soon.

We had our Dallas customer appreciation dinner and had a great time with our customers and friends. Jon Toigo gave a presentation on the state of Enterprise Storage and it was very well received and prompted many discussions during dinner.

Last year was the first time we ever displayed at EMC World and it was a great success for us. We saw many of our customers and met many new folks who are trying to control their support costs. The folks at EMC put on a great show last year in Orlando, and we expect this year to be just as good in Boston.

We hope to see you there.

Jon Toigo initiated another dialogue with me which you can read below.

Conversations with Mike 2

Once again, I exchanged some emails with a guy who is in the trenches with customers as much as I am: Mike Linett, CEO of Zerowait. This is from a continuing email exchange that I thought was worth sharing.

Hi Mike,

Several inquiries have been coming my way to perform storage assessments as companies seek to drive cost out of infrastructure. One, in particular, is looking for a better management plan to reduce the costs of labor associated with storage administration, but the majority of the others are seeking tactical cost reductions through the use of less name brand-y gear and the replacement of service contracts on the gear they already have (sourced from their OEMs) with qualified third party maintenance and support. Many have moved older gear into a secondary storage role, which I take to mean that they are not taking it off the line, but they are using it to store less frequently accessed data.

Are you seeing similar trends? What, honestly, are the benefits and the potential foibles of such a strategy?

As I see it, going to off-brand storage arrays that do a yeoman’s job of primary storage but without the brand name OEM pricing is a tactic that is well worth a look in this economy. The problem is that some of my clients are already hurting for staff and seem to be buying into the claims of brand name vendors that wrap around service and support contracts are an offset to being short handed. True?

Second, band name or not, the real cost drivers in storage are mismanagement of data and lack of visibility into infrastructure that enables proactive redress of problems that are building up. There is also a huge disconnect between the storage folks (most of whom are server folks) and the infrastructure changes that they are making and whoever is doing disaster recovery planning. Data volumes are being added or moved and mirrors/backup schemes are being broken unnoticed. That’s scary.

Third, I have always been a proponent of qualified third party maintenance as an alternative to overpriced maintenance agreements from OEMs, as you know. I mean, why should you pay for maintenance from the OEM, which tends to increase in cost as the gear gets older, if you have migrated the gear itself into a secondary storage role?

Finally, some customers tell me that they are being wooed to outsource – I’m sorry, cloud-ify – their secondary storage at 20 cents per GB. As an aside, I wonder if anyone is doing the math on drive technology advances, like Toshiba’s 5TB per square inch drives, which are coming to market within the next 36 months? Assuming that drives are enterprise quality and follow the same cost pattern as previous units, it seems to me that we are looking at pennies per GB on massive drive capacities in the near future. So, why use a cloud for capacity?

Looking forward to your response.

Hi Jon:

Storage assessments and a reappraisal of the way organizations are structuring their data has become a large part of our engineering team’s daily discussions with customers. Even the folks in the executive offices understand that a Seagate drive should not cost 400% more when purchased through their storage OEM’s, than from NewEgg. The perceived value of enterprise storage vendor’s wares has declined as the effects of the financial panic of 2008 and 2009 have trickled down and curtailed the Enterprise storage acquisition budgets of most organizations.

It used to be that when we would offer a quote for support to customer they would ask us “How can you charge so little?” In 2010, savvy customers ask us “ Why are OEM’s charging so much for support for of their equipment?” The answer remains that for some organizations there is a perceived value to having a different vinyl sticker or bezel color that makes the high price seem rational.

Often, I go to see a customer and we walk through their Data Center and assess the equipment within it. Most customers recognize that their equipment is made up of component parts from the same manufacturers, and that there are vast differences in price based on the OEM’s sales and marketing staff. IT managers understand that they don’t have the staff or resources required to integrate and debug hardware and firmware, but they can certainly see that a Seagate drive or an LSI card is the same in their Dell server as in their high priced array. So, they have to question the pricing models that the manufacturers’ are using, and they do not see the offsetting value of proprietary software from vendor’s offsetting their engineers’ costs. In fact, just the opposite is occurring. Customers are quickly recognizing that their engineering generalists can manage more open source equipment than their specialists can manage of proprietary arrays. Therefore, the higher priced array’s specialization is costing more to manage than an open sourced simple storage solution.

This model for 80% of an IT infrastructure creates more value out of best of breed components then piecing together proprietary solutions from a mix of vendors, and paying support for equipment which is used with F150 Pickup requirements.

JT – Second, band name or not, the real cost drivers in storage are mismanagement of data and lack of visibility into infrastructure that enables proactive redress of problems that are building up. There is also a huge disconnect between the storage folks (most of whom are server folks) and the infrastructure changes that they are making and whoever is doing disaster recovery planning. Data volumes are being added or moved and mirrors/backup schemes are being broken unnoticed. That’s scary.

IT today is very similar to business in general and the 80/20 rule applies. 80 percent of most business comes from 20% of the customer list. In IT, 80% of most organizations’ IT assets handle 20% of traffic, while 20% handle 80% of traffic. What is great about managing open source solutions is that it is easy to create a POSIX like solution for your own architecture and environment. Once your organization determines a “good enough” server and storage solution, your favorite integrator can build all types of hardware with minor changes in cards, memory and processor that use homogenous components. Using open source software the maintenance and support costs are lower and since there is an easily tapped community of experts to answer questions, a good staff of IT generalists will be able to provide a larger portion of an Organization’s IT infrastructure without specialized training.
Don’t panic. Embrace the wisdom of the marketplace. Slowly migrate to a solution of best of breed commodity hardware, and a staff of IT engineering generalists who know how to find answers.

JT – Third, I have always been a proponent of qualified third party maintenance as an alternative to overpriced maintenance agreements from OEMs, as you know. I mean, why should you pay for maintenance from the OEM, which tends to increase in cost as the gear gets older, if you have migrated the gear itself into a secondary storage role?

I sort of covered this earlier in my response, essentially people and organizations have different perceived values on the prices that OEM’s charge. Hard times demand more attention be paid to these costs, and this inevitably drives more companies to embrace third party support, as well as other self support models. Essentially, a movement toward commoditization and rationalization of computer hardware is occurring because of the tightened IT budgets.

JT -Finally, some customers tell me that they are being wooed to outsource – I’m sorry, cloud-ify – their secondary storage at 20 cents per GB. As an aside, I wonder if anyone is doing the math on drive technology advances, like Toshiba’s 5TB per square inch drives, which are coming to market within the next 36 months? Assuming that drives are enterprise quality and follow the same cost pattern as previous units, it seems to me that we are looking at pennies per GB on massive drive capacities in the near future. So, why use a cloud for capacity?

I have been trying to understand the foggy logic of cloud computing for a while, and although the marketing and sales pitches are really nice, the dollars and sense logic has escaped me. I can understand why certain applications can make sense as an outsourced solution, but I don’t see the benefits in cloud computing for most organizations that need data security as well as uninterrupted connectivity. I think there will be some good technologies developed through the cloud computing efforts that are being marketed today. I don’t see cloud computing taking away the corporate responsibility of providing a reliable network of systems to deliver content and data to users for the enterprise to thrive.

Mike

Jon and I would like your comments .

One of our European customers has been getting the run around from their current vendor’s sales team on their equipment pricing, upgrade and licensing policies and has been working with our European sales team to try to get to the bottom of the issue. The root cause of the issue is that the OEM sales team is focused on new product sales through bonuses and incentives, and hence that is the direction that they take. Our business is a service business. Our focus is long term retention of customers by providing them with affordable service and support.

High availability storage equipment is made to last for the long term. Coincidentally, our aim is to provide reliable support for the long term. Our focus provides a long term low cost strategy for customers of their storage equipment and also provides a long term business mode for Zerowait.

This week I visited several clients in North Carolina. Although their budgets are tight they are still trying to manage their growing storage requirements. The companies I visited with are working with our company to help them manage more storage with less money. Most of the clients I was meeting were referred to our company through the years and have referred our company to their peers. Two of the clients I met with were customers at their old companies and as they moved to new positions they recommended us and eventually their new employers became our clients also.

That is the way it seems to work. Our company has earned a reputation for honesty and dependability, and we really care about providing our customers with the service and support they need. Times are hard in many of the IT departments I met with this week, and they really appreciate how Zerowait helps them stretch their storage networking budgets.

Earlier this week I was visiting some of our clients in Canada. Each of the clients had a story to tell about how they were stretching their IT budgets and finding new ways to redeploy or use their older equipment. Rather than buying new, they have recognized that their older equipment is still High Availability although it has been superseded by the manufacturer. We have entered an era of austerity and the virtues of conservation of capital will become evident to the CFO’s of many organizations over the next few years.

We are talking to customers who are redeploying older equipment in the USA and throughout the world as customers try to rationalize the features and values they are receiving from their software and hardware vendors. It makes sense to maintain equipment and stretch out the service duty cycle the same way many people are keeping their cars longer than they used to.

In my opinion, it is the uncertainty of the future of business taxes and regulations which are causing a wave of cautious conservatism in IT budgets. Uncertainty has costs which are hard to quantify, but when reviewed make sense.

I am optimistic about 2010, because our customers recognize that we can help them thrive in the era of austerity.