Zerowait Corporation

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.

May 13- Wrap up.

EMC World 2010 was another great event put on by the folks at EMC. Linda Christensen does a great job. We caught up with a lot of our customers at the show and we met with a number of old friends also. Jon Toor is with www.Xsigo.com now and their booth was busy for most of the show. Phil Van Ettan was also very busy at the www.Azaleos.com booth. Additionally, we had a good conversation with Charles Wood at www.f5networks.com about their single name space solution. We also had a long and interesting conversation with Simon Robinson of the 451 Group. Robin Harris www.storagemojo.com stopped by to get our view of the storage environment and we had a long conversation with him.

Having our rail kit on hand was a funny experience, some folks looked at us like we were crazy, others couldn’t grab the brochure fast enough.

Here are some shots from another satisfied customer. iWeb in Canada recently purchased some off lease systems and storage, and sent us the following pictures:

We’re off to a great start this year as more customers recognize the cost savings Zerowait can provide. Give us a call today and we’ll help you fit your increased requirements into your reduced budget. It’s not magic – but it feels like it.

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.