Zerowait Corporation

Saving money in the Data Center on energy costs, seems to be something just about all of our clients want to do. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article that pointed out how radically different an energy producing country’s administration feels about alternative power generation and resource usage, as compared to our Administration’s point of view.

Currently, we think of power outages as incidents, not long term events. But what if energy is curtailed for the long term?

The article …
“Saudi Arabia Oil Minister Ali Naimi lobbed a verbal salvo in the crude vs. renewables scuffle. In a speech to oil executives in Houston, he warned that promoting the growth of renewable fuels too quickly could create a “nightmare scenario” – too little investment in oil, while renewables aren’t yet ready to pick up the slack.

His remarks seemed aimed at officials in Washington D.C. and particularly members of President Barack Obama’s administration. His speech comes at a time when the new Obama administration embarks on an ambitious path to steer the country’s energy policy away from fossil fuels. President Obama was to instate a national renewable electricity mandate and a carbon cap-and-trade system this year.

“We must be mindful that efforts to rapidly promote alternatives could have a ‘chilling effect’ on investment in the oil sector,” he said at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates oil conference, according to his prepared remarks. “A nightmare scenario would be created if alternative energy supplies fail to meet overly optimistic expectations, while traditional energy suppliers scale back investment.”

That echoes an argument made last summer by a Dutch think tank–basically, that oil-producing nations are just as concerned about “security of demand” as consumer countries are about “security of supply.”

Mr. Naimi’s warning against ramping up investments and expectations in renewable energy comes at a time when OPEC members are feeling the financial pain of low crude oil prices.
Mr. Naimi, the longtime oil minister for Saudi Arabia, is one of the most influential voices in the oil world. But he speaks as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has slashed output in an effort to cut supplies and keep prices from falling.

Still, Mr. Naimi acknowledged that the world was likely headed towards a transition away from fossil fuels. But he said it wasn’t clear which fuels or technologies would be able to gain the scale and economics needed to replace crude oil.

The cost of replacing the current “highly efficient and economical” energy infrastructure with alternatives would be “prohibitive” in the short term. “A prudent approach demands we recognize that the massive scale of the global energy system makes rapid change costly and impractical,” he said.”

The article led me to ask some questions:

1) What happens to data center costs and up time guarantees if we run into a power crisis?
2) How do we decide which systems are critical in a completely integrated network?
3) Do we have a Disaster Prevention plan that includes provisions for which systems are critical if we only are allocated 80% of the power consumption we used last year?
4) Which servers and appliances can be turned off and are not critical?
5) How often are you going to do a backup and will we have the power to complete it?
6) How long can our UPS and generators realistically provide the extra power we need?
7) What will this do to our bottom line costs of operations?

** linked to by Simon Sharwood – Thank you.

The recession is causing a lot of companies to focus on their bottom line, some companies are laying off people which is always hard and others are trying to cut expenses in various ways. Cutting expenses is also hard when a lot of things are purchased as long term service contracts. Whether you agree with the efforts the government is taking or not there is no doubt that there will be unforeseen effects to the long term economy caused by the actions they are taking. According to the head of the Congressional Budget Office – Douglas Elmendorf:
“CBO estimates that by 2019 the Senate legislation would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent on net.”

For perspective on the time frame – 2019 may seem like a long time away, but it is only 10 years, and Zerowait is now in our 20th year in business.

Making strategic business plans in such an environment is very difficult and I think it is one of the main reasons that we are seeing our business prosper. Keeping things going for the short term is a viable alternative. There are no clear signs of how to judge interest rates and business activity over the next year, and according to the Congressional Budget office the current bill could actually hurt long term growth

“In contrast to its positive near-term macroeconomic effects, the Senate legislation would reduce output slightly in the long run, CBO estimates, as would other similar proposals. The principal channel for this effect is that the legislation would result in an increase in government debt. To the extent that people hold their wealth in the form of government bonds rather than in a form that can be used to finance private investment, the increased government debt would tend to “crowd out” private investment—thus reducing the stock of private capital and the long-term potential output of the economy.”

Forecasting the future is not possible in these turbulent times – there seems to be no consensus. By the way, the CBO’s 10 year time frame is often considered to be two hardware upgrade cycles by our customers. Since the effects of the government’s actions are not quantifiable by economists and business analysts it is not a surprise that folks are holding on to equipment longer and stretching life cycles.

I think we are seeing the effects of uncertainty as a business driver.

Last week I went to visit customers and friends in DC, Atlanta and Charlotte. Our list of government customers is growing as time goes by for a number of reasons. Just like everyone else the government needs to stretch their budgets and recognizes that storage subsystems that were built for high availability a few years ago, remain reliable even after they are superseded by the manufacturer’s newest models. Maximizing the capacity of the heads that are in place makes a lot of sense with your and my budget dollars. Thanks uncle Sam .

In the strange twisted intersection of Government and the financial sector that has been brought about by the recent infusions of Government money into the banking system, there has been a uptick in interest in our services at banks that are NetApp users also. These banks are also looking to stretch their storage infrastructure’s lifespan beyond the OEM’s End Of Life statements.

Thoughts of economizing on network and storage equipment seems to be going on in both the Government sector and the financial sector, and from the meetings it seems that there is a general understanding that maintaining equipment that performs well is a logical and cost effective way to stretch everyone’s budget dollars.

Tough economic times have often inspired creative solutions to problems, and more and more companies are recognizing that our company provides a reliable way to manage and maintain their storage assets for the long term, and they are asking us to provide them more services also.

Also, today I want to say thank you for search storage for citing my blog in a recent article.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/29046–Sectors-GDrive-details-revealed

It still surprises me to see who reads my blog on a regular basis.

For many years we have been working with companies on slightly unusual network applications. In the 1990’s we worked with a lot of companies as they got onto the web and started to do credit card transactions. One of the first companies that we worked with on a major load balancing and security project was Cybercash. I thought they had a great business, but ultimately they failed for a variety of reasons. The unintended consequences of fast growth and losing their focus on their objectives were certainly general causes.

Knitting together the software and patches that keep routers, switches, servers, applications and security working does not have to end in failure. By addressing the unintended consequences of each component and their effects on each of the other components, high availability networks can be built and maintained. It just takes planning. Unfortunately, many admins and IT execs don’t have time to plan to this extent–which is why many networks are continually added to and why many customers with network attached storage seem to operate in a seemingly catch-up mode as they work to maximize their storage infrastructures. It is often more expedient to add to the current network and patch a piece than rethink the whole thing.

This all leads up to what will happen to storage and network growth when budgets get cut and regular purchasing is stopped or severely diminished. I suspect that storage and network administrators will begin to acquire storage on an as-needed basis and purchase it over time. This will differ from past behavior where they sought to purchase in bulk for future growth. The pricing models and terms are still being worked out by numerous vendors, and ownership of capacity and components has to be determined. The economics of enterprise storage is changing with the economic conditions. It will be interesting to see which vendors will be able to adapt to the changes and which unintended consequences are brought about by the current recession and our reactions to it.

Over the past week I have spoken to some storage administrator friends who manage great islands of storage. And while they still have excess capacity on their heads and can redeploy storage in different ways, they have been told to curtail their new raw storage equipment purchases. Putting storage purchases off can work for a little while because most of the time customers buy more storage than they actually need at time of procurement. But eventually, more media will have to be purchased. Maximizing the capacity and utility of the heads works well for many of our customers because the majority of storage is only accessed occasionally, so by redeploying storage to older heads, probably will not noticeably change data access speeds for end users.

History has shown that storage media prices go down over time, so buying storage as you need it really makes a lot of sense for many customers, and this section of our business has been growing lately. Folks are recognizing that maximizing heads with storage is a great idea when budgets are tight. But perhaps the harder economic climate is also teaching people to think creatively about their storage purchases and usage.

A study last year raises some interesting questions, and may explain why many of our FAS980 customers are currently maximizing the capacity of these older systems.

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.

…..
Statistically speaking, most data on enterprise networks rarely gets accessed after it is written to network storage, according to researchers from NetApp Inc. and the University of California. Evidently, we are too busy writing new data to go back over old data.

Andrew Leung, a computer science researcher at the University of California, presented the findings at the USENIX conference in Boston last week. Given those results, organizations might want to consider moving much of their data to slower but less expensive storage units since it rarely gets accessed, he said.”

I was in DC the past few days visiting with some of our federal customers. One of our customers told me that there were some sweeteners in the Stimulus Bill regarding storage purchases. I thought that this was interesting, so I went on line this morning to see if I could find the aspects that may have a direct impact on our business.

I could not find anything that directly referenced what we do, but it looks like there is some more data going to be stored.

Here is the link:

http://readthestimulus.org/

S.336 (S.1) Senate Democrats Bill Text 1/27, Page 305:
(6) human-computer interaction and information management technologies; and (7) the social and economic implications of information technology. Subtitle C—Incentives for the Use of Health Information Technology PART I—GRANTS AND LOANS FUNDING SEC. 13301. GRANT, LOAN, AND DEMONSTRATION PROGRAMS. Title XXX of the Public Health Service Act, as added by section 13101, is amended by adding at the end ..

S.336 (S.1) Senate Democrats Bill Text 1/27, Page 36:
… $8,650,000,000 shall be expended pursuant to section 201 of this Act, of which: not less than $200,000,000 shall be available for competitive grants for expanding public computer center capacity, including at community colleges and public libraries; not less than $250,000,000 shall be available for competitive grants for innovative programs to encourage sustainable adoption of broadband service; …

House Democrats 1/23/09 Bill Text, Page 438:
… 1991 (15 U.S.C. 5511) shall coordinate Federal research and development programs related to the development and deployment of health information technology, including activities related to— (1) computer infrastructure; (2) data security; (3) development of large-scale, distributed, reliable computing systems; (4) wired, wireless, and hybrid high-speed networking; (5) development of software and …

House Democrats 1/15/09 Committee Report, Page 71:
… structures, signals and communications, power equipment and substations, passenger stations and terminals, security equipment and systems, maintenance facilities and equipment, operational support equipment including computer hardware and software, system extensions, and preventive maintenance. Funds will be distributed through the existing fixed guideway formula. It is estimated that the state-of …

axman 1/16/09 Tax Provisions, Page 181:
… TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM.—The National High-Performance Computing Program established by section 101 of the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 (15 U.S.C. 5511) shall coordinate Federal research and development programs related to the development and deployment of health information technology, including activities related to— (1) computer infrastructure; (2) data security;

House Democrats 1/15/09 Committee Report, Page 64:
The Social Security Administration (SSA) National Computer Center (NCC) is nearly 30 years old and it will soon be unable to support the critical systems necessary to SSA’s mission. The construction … to meet the growing needs of SSA for the processing of retirement and disability claims, and storage of wage and medical records. An estimated 400 jobs will be created during the construction process. …

Over the last few months a lot of customers have told us how much they appreciate our storage support solutions. As networks and storage grew in complexity and amount of storage under management, companies often found their support and maintenance costs getting out of control. But when times were good not many people cared about the spiraling costs of support and maintenance.

Times changed, now there is a recognized need to stretch infrastructure to get the most out of capacity and performance. While manufacturers typically want you to upgrade, many companies are now finding out that they can maintain their old equipment and get enough performance and capacity to get by if they use an alternative maintenance and support company.

Zerowait has a history of successful high availability support in networks and storage. We are now in our twentieth year in business, and have a reputation for excellence. Over the next quarter we will be introducing some new services based on the requests of our customers.

If your OEM won’t support your legacy equipment don’t be afraid, there is an alternative available that can provide you the support, parts and services you need to keep your High availability storage running reliably for many years.

It was inevitable, margins are shrinking in the router and switch business and they are still quite comfortable in servers and storage. Cisco will be entering the server business and I think they will quickly get into the enterprise storage business also. Silicon Valley Capitalism is entering another phase of creative destruction.

…. companies like Cisco see an opportunity to produce a new, potentially disruptive class of hardware and software management systems that span an entire data center. With customers looking to manage their data centers as a single entity rather than separate units, the world’s largest technology companies must now fight to secure the most prominent, central position possible.

Cisco’s newfound aspirations stretch well beyond the $50 billion server market to include management software and possibly even storage.

“Our vision is, how do we virtualize the entire data center?” Ms. Warrior said. “It is not about a single product. We will have a series of products that enable us to make that transition.”

We are living in interesting times.

For the last couple of days I have been in New England visiting with customers. The economy is on every one’s mind here, as are the arctic temperatures. Several clients are interested in how we can save them money on their storage infrastructure. There is a recognition that storage does not stop growing because the economy slows. Although, if there are fewer email recipients in a company, the pace of storage growth does seem to subside.

Yesterday I read about the Cloud Engines Pogoplug in the Wall Street Journal. And as I read the article I kept thinking how this device will make it harder to secure corporate data.

Some consumers like the idea of storing files with a Web service, so they can retrieve and share them while they are on the go. But they aren’t keen on the monthly fees some storage-services charge.

So a San Francisco startup called Cloud Engines Inc. has developed a way to do much the same thing with technology users keep at home. Just plug your computer’s external disk drive into the Pogoplug, a nondescript little gadget the company has developed, using a familiar USB connector. Another plug connects using an Ethernet cable to a user’s home router, which connects to the Internet. (The set-up allows the Pogoplug to be accessible to traveling users even when their PCs are not turned on). Once the device is installed, all the music, videos or other files on your hard drive are viewable through a Web browser.

Some external disk drives say they can do this now, but they require more setup, Cloud Engines says. And with Pogoplug, there are no monthly fees.

Imagine that you have a disgruntled employee who gets laid off because of the tough economic times. Articles already are pointing out that the disgruntled former employee may take your corporate data. Now all they will have to do is put it on the external drive or memory stick and there it is available on the web. Devices like the Pogoplug may finally spur corporations to encrypt their data, will they react before data thefts occur or after?