Zerowait Corporation

Over the last several weeks we have been talking to customers about what they like and dislike about their storage providers. Listening to the stories of what they are told by their OEM salesman and engineers and comparing that to the reality of service and support after product delivery reveals a startling comparison of promises versus reality.

Dealing with the big Storage OEMS’s reminded one customer of The Star Trek scene of Fizzbin. I like that comparison.

Fizzbin – The Rules of the Game
Kirk: The name of the game is called… Fizzbin. Each player gets 6 cards, except for the player on the dealer’s right, who gets 7.
Thug: On the right.
Kirk: Yeah. The second card is turned up, except on Tuesdays.
Thug: Tuesday.
Kirk: Ohh! Look what you’ve got- 2 jacks. You got a half-fizzbin already.
Thug: I need another jack?
Kirk: No. If you got another jack, why you’d have a shralk.
Thug: A shralk?
Kirk: Yes, you’d be disqualified. No, what you need now is either a king and a deuce, except at night, of course, when you’d need a queen and a four.
Thug: Except at night.
Kirk: Right. Oh, look at that, you’ve got another jack! How lucky you are! How wonderful for you! Now if you didn’t get another jack, if you had gotten a king, why then you’d get another card except when it’s dark , when you’d have to give it back.
Thug: If it were dark on Tuesday.
Kirk: Yes, but what you’re after is a royal fizzbin, but the odds of getting a royal fizzbin are astron – Spock, what are the odds on getting a royal fizzbin?
Spock: I have never computed them, Captain.
Kirk: Well, they’re astronomical, believe me. Now, for the last card, we’ll call it a kronk. You got that?
Thug: What?

Compare Captain Kirk’s exchange with the response you get when you are trying to navigate the RMA process or find out where your 4 hour parts guy is.

Repeatedly we are told that Zerowait provides easy to understand service and support, and no hassles. Things don’t have to be confusing, so why do manufacturers make it that way?

A lot of the trade press is talking about cloud computing and even the Economist has gotten the bug. That surprised me because the cloud is a fairly technical concept.

“Granted, there are hundreds if not thousands of firms offering cloud services—web-based applications living in data centres, such as music sites or social networks. But Microsoft, Google and Apple play in a different league. Each has its own global network of data centres. They intend to offer not just one or two services, but whole suites of them, with services including e-mail, address books, storage, collaboration tools and business applications. They are also vying to dominate the periphery, either by developing software for smart-phones and other small devices or by making such devices themselves.”

I speak to customers about cloud services on a daily basis, depending on the definition of “cloud computing” we are all using some or maybe using a lot. But for enterprise storage security reasons most of the folks we work with are leery of the amorphous cloud as their depository for critical company data. At Zerowait we don’t consider remote access of data cloud computing, since most of the companies we deal with have remote data sources and applications.

If remote data centers, web enabled applications and Citrix type access are defined as part of cloud computing, then it is ubiquitous. It seems to depend on the definitions and the expectations of the users and whether they consider the cloud to be third party hosted applications and storage or not.

I think the question should revolve around who owns and runs your organization’s critical databases and applications. If the lines of ownership of the hardware assets and the data are unclear you may be a cloud user already.

Wikipedia says this… “A technical definition is “a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” This definition states that clouds have five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.“

Whatever your opinion is, I think everyone will agree that some stuff should not leave your organization’s control.

A lot of our customers and friends will be at the SC09 show in Portland this year. I have been invited to the show, and will be working with a few of our customers on how to mange and reduce their costs of storage on their 100TB- 1PB storage archives.

Over the last 20 years Zerowait has built a reputation for providing outstanding service and support to our customers. Over the last few months we have received a series of requests to help our customers with extraordinary data sets and tremendous volumes of data.

Outrageously large data sets and constrained budgets should create an atmosphere for some very interesting discussions.

ESJ has an interesting article that I suggest folks looking into cloud computing read. The author, Henry Newman, lays out quite a few issues with bandwidth and recovery time using a cloud storage provider.

An excerpt:

The bandwidth problem isn’t limited to enterprises. In the next 12 to 24 months, most of us will have 10Gbit/sec network connections at work (see Falling 10GbE Prices Spell Doom for Fibre Channel), while at home the fastest connect available as the current backbone of the Internet is OC-768, and each of us internally is going to have a connection that is 6.5 percent of OC-768. That will be limited, of course, by our DSL and cable connections, but their performance is going to grow and use up the backbone bandwidth. This is pretty shocking when you consider how much data we create and how long it takes to move it around. I have a home Internet backup service and about 1TB of data at home. It took me about three months to get all of the data copied off site via my cable connection, which was the bottleneck. If I had a crash before the off-site copy was created, I would have lost data.

The issue that our customers are running into is in managing the backup and archiving requirements and data restoration time over the web. Henry Newman touches on these issues. Every organization values its data assets differently and needs an affordable strategy to archive data. Although cloud storage may be affordable, it may not provide the data recovery access that your organization needs to satisfy your clients.

Where is your bottleneck, and what can you do to accelerate your data recovery to provide your customers the service they need? If you can’t help your customers when they call because your data is unavailable, you will be providing your competitors an opportunity to take some business away.

I thought this was an interesting article –

By Nicole Kobie, 5 Oct 2009 at 12:28
Confused man with his head in his hands

Microsoft knows its licensing is a problem, but don’t expect it to get any simpler anytime soon, chief executive Steve Ballmer has said.

At a Microsoft event today in London, the boisterous Ballmer was put on the spot when a question regarding the complexities of the software giant’s licensing gained enthusiastic applause from the audience of customers and journalists.

While he acknowledged the problem, Ballmer said it wasn’t likely to be solved anytime soon. “I don’t anticipate a big round of simplifying our licensing,” he said.

Ballmer admitted that Microsoft’s licences had some “gotchas” in the fine print, and said that “our people” shouldn’t necessarily be hassling companies over issues in that fine print. “I’m sure we have fine print we don’t need. We’re not saints,” he said.

Licensing is a complicated issue, but it seems that vendors make it harder than it needs to be.

Today’s news confirmed what I heard during my recent trip across the country visiting with our customers. Budgets are tight, and investment in hardware and human resources is going to be slowed by the uncertainty of what the costs of employees will be in the next couple of years.

U.S. Sept non-farm payrolls plunge 263,000

* On Friday October 2, 2009, 8:32 am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. employers cut a deeper-than-expected 263,000 jobs in September, lifting the unemployment rate to 9.8 percent, according to a government report on Friday that fueled fears the weak labor market could undermine economic recovery.

The Labor Department said the unemployment rate was the highest since June 1983 and payrolls had now dropped for 21 consecutive months.

There should be no surprise that when costs are going up enterprises need to find efficiencies. Whether it is stretching the lifespan of their legacy storage equipment to control costs, or finding creative ways to increase storage at a reduced cost with new equipment. In a global economy the most efficient and low cost suppliers will win business.

Over the years many of our customers have been asked why we don’t create our own affordable hardware and software solution. And our answer to that question is that when the time is right we may. For 20 years we have been providing High Availability solutions to our customers problems. If we can bring an affordable High Availability product to market that meets our customers requirements we will.

A friend of mine wrote me the following “Storage is the last bastion of high margins for IT vendors that make proprietary products. Ethernet, fiber channel, wireless and even operating systems have become commodity products. Storage is a commodity and should be priced accordingly.” He was wondering why the storage vendors can charge so much for their products when all the components are a commodity.

William Wang the CEO of Vizio wrote ” Anything that’s popular will become a commodity. We’re not here to build a cheap product; we’re here to make the product affordable.

At Zerowait we understand why our customers and friends are perplexed by the price of commercially available storage. Everyone should recognizes that the parts are commodities, but integrating them into a High Availability solution that can withstand contact with hundreds of customer environments is tricky.

If you want a purpose built custom built solution built out of commodity parts, you can take a kit builder’s approach and stitch one together fairly inexpensively. But if you want an integrated service and support solution that supplies automatic replacement parts and 24 hour technical support that will add to the cost of goods. Every company determines what risks it can afford to take in a slightly different way. Vendors of high priced storage arrays have worked hard to build their reputations for product reliability.

Zerowait’s customers are looking for long term value and don’t expect commodity service and support. They are looking for outstanding service and support for their high availability storage. Now in our 20th year, we provide an affordable alternative to high priced storage vendors support solutions.

I have been traveling around the USA visiting customers for the last two weeks. It has been a long trip and I have heard from a lot of large storage customers that budgets remain constricted. Adding storage capacity that is affordable remains a problem, as does adding staff when corporations are looking to shrink payrolls through attrition. I spoke to a few companies in California that are hiring in other states and countries, but not in California anymore. Staff shortages are creating problems for the folks responsible for data storage managment . Some are looking at outsourcing some of their storage management, but that also costs money which is unavailable.

I spoke with many business owners along the way, and their was not much enthusiasm for investing in infrastructure or people in the current business environment. Almost universally the folks I met with are looking to find incremental savings within their organizations. However, most companies are now running very lean.

It remains an interesting business environment.

My goodness the guys at Backblaze have gotten people talking about storage value. This morning I heard from one customer of ours who likes the BackBlaze price points who asked if we could provide an enterprise service and support model for a system like the one they talk about in their blog. The answer is “yes we can”, but whether it makes sense to a customer depends on how they value the risk and reward for each of the following topics.

Scalability -How a customer views the issue of expandability and the related islands of storage is important to how they determine how much they are willing to spend on putting their storage in one basket. The Backblaze type solution makes sense in certain places in a Hierarchical Storage Model, but how customers value storage accessibility is a question that is very hard to answer. There are certainly customers of ours that find this price point a viable solution.

Predictability – What is the MTBF of the BackBlaze solution? There are many components in their solution that are not hot swappable. This works in their specific environment, but our customers seem to want a bit more and so the price point goes up marginally for hot swap parts.

Affordability – Our customers want a long term solution that is affordable to acquire and inexpensive to maintain. We are known for our high availability service and support and the BackBlaze type of solution could fit very easily into our business model.

Reliability – Adapting a set of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components that are built for a specific solution can create a solution that meets the required reliability of the application. It is relatively easy to integrate a solution that meets a market need if it is defined very tightly.

As the leader in independent NetApp service and support, we recognize that there is interest in a solution like the BackBlaze product. But customer conversations that we have had today show that there is more interest in a storage model that has the price point of their product combined with a high availability service model.

We will be looking into this more over the next few weeks.

Did you ever notice that there is an inverse relationship between data archiving budgets and data archiving growth. Data that is accessed once on a blue moon is expensive to store on spinning media, and it is hard to keep track of tapes that seem to get lost, misplaced or erased whenever there is a reporter around.

Lost backup tape prompts IT changes at NY bank – Network World (June 2008)
Officials at Bank of New York Mellon Corp. late last week said it has launched a new policy to encrypt data held on all storage devices and to limit the amount of confidential client data stored on tape drives. The policy was launched after unencrypted backup data tapes were twice lost by third party couriers this year.
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Clients’ data missing, Harvard Law warns – The Boston Globe (November 2008)
A technician lost the tape while traveling by subway between the Jamaica Plain office and the law school in Cambridge. It was one of six tapes he had put in his backpack for the trip.
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Info on 3.9M Citigroup customers lost (June 2005)
Citigroup, the nation’s biggest financial services company, said that UPS lost the tapes while shipping them to a credit bureau in Texas.
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Missing backup tape prompts identity theft fears for JC Penney customers (Jan 2008)
GE said the tape was discovered missing last October by a worker at a warehouse run by Boston-based data-protection and storage company, Iron Mountain Inc.

Cloud based storage is also risky for secondary and tertiary storage, because there is always the possibility of a third party having a business issue, or a malicious employee.

Frequently we are asked by customers if we can help them, and the answer is “yes”. When budgets are tight and mandatory compliance issues are making choices difficult, Zerowait can help with our storage options. We can help put together archiving systems of hundreds of TB’s for a fraction of the cost of most hardware vendors. We have the equipment in stock and ready to configure.

If you need an affordable archiving solution give us a call. High availability storage does not have to break your budget!