Zerowait Corporation

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are looking at an alternative to silicon SSD’s . It could create an interesting new niche market for high performance storage.

“New Nanowire-Based Memory Could Beef Up Information Storage
by Laura Mgrdichian, Nanotechnology / Physics
A scanning electron microscope image of a cross section of a GeTeGesub2subSbsub2subTesub5sub nanowire (the arrow points to the Gesub2subSbsub2subTesub5sub core).
A scanning electron microscope image of a cross section of a GeTe/Ge2Sb2Te5 nanowire (the arrow points to the Ge2Sb2Te5 core).

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have created a type of nanowire-based information storage device that is capable of storing three bit values rather than the usual two—that is, “0,” “1,” and “2” instead of just “0” and “1.” This ability could lead to a new generation of high-capacity information storage for electronic devices.

“The use of nanowires to create electronic memory is advantageous for several reasons, but a non-binary form of nanowire memory like we have created could allow for a huge increase in the memory density of potential future devices,” said corresponding researcher Ritesh Agarwal, an assistant professor at the UPenn School of Engineering and Applied Science, to PhysOrg.com.

Conventional nanowire-based memory schemes have so far been binary, as is traditional transistor-based memory. In addition to affecting memory density, a non-binary nanowire-based type of memory would allow fewer nanowires to be used to achieve impressive storage capacity. This could allow electronic devices with memory—and that’s nearly all of them—to become more compact. Moreover, fewer nanowires to work with means that fabrication could be simpler.

The nanowires used by the UPenn group have a “core-shell” structure, like a coaxial cable, and consist of two phase-change materials. The core is made of germanium/antimony/tellurium compound Ge2Sb2Te5, while the cylindrical shell is made of germanium telluride (GeTe).

The phase changes are achieved by subjecting the nanowires to pulsed electric fields. This process heats the nanowires, altering the core and shell structure from crystalline (ordered) to amorphous (disordered). These two states correspond to two different electrical resistances: a low resistance for the case where both the core and shell are crystalline, and a high resistance when they are both amorphous. In turn, these resistances represent two of the three bit values.

The third value corresponds to the case where the core is amorphous while the shell is crystalline (or visa versa), resulting in an intermediate resistance.

Nanowires are excellent media for information storage, due to several factors. These include their often defect-free crystalline structures, which lead to superior behaviors that can be tuned by varying the nanowires’ dimensions, such as diameter, and other controllable properties.

Additionally, creating information storage from nanowires can be done via “bottom-up” approaches—using the natural tendency of tiny structures to self-assemble into larger structures—that may be able to break free of the limitations faced by traditional “top-down” methods, such as patterning a circuit onto a silicon wafer by depositing a nanowire thin film.

In future research, Agarwal and his colleagues plan to investigate how the nanowires’ size and chemical composition affects their electrical behavior, with the hope of finding new properties that could lead to electronic devices with novel features.

This work is described in the June 13, 2008, online edition of Nano Letters. “

I remember in 1998 and 1999 when we were selling new NetApp F740’s and F760’s and it was a big deal to sell a system that went to 1 TB. It was not that long ago. This week we are working on a couple of Petabyte systems. Back in 1999 we were building 1 TB systems with 18 and 36 GB drives. Now we are building Petabyte systems with 500GB and 750 GB drives.

The funny thing is that even NetApp’s engineers are saying that up to 90% of storage is rarely looked at once it is put on disk. System administrators see this all the time. Which is one more reason that savvy storage adminstrators recognize that Zerowait allows them to keep their legacy systems running affordably, so they can buy a newer system appropriately sized for only the high performance storage that requires it. When budgets are tight reviewing how your storage is used makes more sense than ever.

Last night I was reading an article in the Economist that was praising the CEO of VMware, Diane Green. I thought it was a particularly interesting article, This morning I read an article by Adam Lashinsky which had a distinctly different spin on her abilities.

You be the judge … Did EMC make the right decision?

The Economist

The opposite of Steve Jobs

With her thinking on competition, however, Ms Greene may be onto something. To be sure, in the high-tech industry, competition and co-operation have always gone hand in hand. The phenomenon has come to be called “co-opetition”, but in the end, the competitive forces have always been stronger. However, as computing migrates into the cloud and becomes a service online, and as different pieces of software become ever more interconnected, then there is likely to be much more of a premium on co-operation. If computing used to be mainly about defending the citadel, it is now more about huddling with partners.

In which case, you would expect more high-tech companies to appoint leaders like Ms Greene. Indeed, that is one way of looking at the retirement of Bill Gates as Microsoft’s “chief software architect”, and his replacement by the more amenable Ray Ozzie. It is hard to imagine Mr Ozzie getting into public fights with Eric Schmidt, Google’s equally level-headed boss, the way Mr Gates did with Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive. Mr Jobs, by the way, will probably always remain something of an exception: his firm’s business today is still much more about control of the brand and the users’ experience than it is about co-operation. Interestingly, of all his colleagues in Silicon Valley, Mr Jobs is said to be particularly fond of Ms Greene. After all, opposites attract.

Adam Lashinsky

Adam Lashinsky’s dispatches on finance from the West Coast
EMC to VMware CEO: Buh-bye

VMware (VMW) announced this morning that its co-founder and CEO, Diane Greene, is leaving the company, “effective immediately.” Her replacement is Microsoft (MSFT) retiree Paul Maritz. At the same time, the company lowered its financial expectations for this year in the last line of its news release: “While VMware is not updating guidance for Q2, we expect revenues for the full year of 2008 will be modestly below the previous guidance of 50% growth over 2007.”

“I wrote a feature about VMware’s CEO Diane Greene last year in which I wrote about her friction with EMC. It was a wrought situation. EMC controlled VMware, but VMware was the golden goose, giving Greene a great deal of power. Until, it seems, she couldn’t deliver. The executive quoted in VMware’s release noting Greene’s departure is VMware’s chairman, Joe Tucci, also EMC’s chief executive.”

According to a study partly done by the good folks at NetApp, “most data in enterprise networks rarely gets accessed” If this is the case , why should a customer put these rarely accessed files on the newest storage array? That is the question many storage administrators are asking themselves after they hear the latest FUD filled presentation from their OEM storage sales person.

“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.”

Often when customers review their storage access patterns they see that maximizing their old arrays is the cheapest way to keep these rarely accessed files on line, which is reinforced by this study.

“The team studied the traffic that flowed through NetApp’s enterprise file servers, which manage more than 22T of material relating to all aspects of the company’s business operations.

Leung said the study is the first large-scale examination of network traffic patterns. “How people have been deploying network file systems has been changing over the past five to 10 years,” he said. “They are being used more commonly for different kinds of things. So what we would like to know is how this affects the workloads of the network.”

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.”

In a tight budget environment a little storage analysis can go a long way toward saving your company money while keeping your highly accessed storage highly available. If you are only migrating your highly accessed data to the newest storage array you may be able to buy a smaller system. Maintaining rarely touched data on your older storage arrays makes sense to everyone but the commission based sales force selling you the new equipment. How much does it cost your company to migrate and maintain rarely touched data onto new equipment? How much does it cost to only migrate highly accessed data to the new storage array? How much money can we save by buying a smaller system? Asking yourself these questions can save a lot of money for your IT department.

Rumors have been circling for some time about an expansion of the NetApp / CDW partnership. And from what I am hearing it is now official and NetApp is unveiling a big marketing push to support CDW as a primary sales agency. How this will impact NetApp current VARS is open for discussion. But CDW is recognized as a broad market distributor with little technical support. Will they be able to sell high priced arrays? Only time will tell.

Interesting times.

Zerowait has seen a major uptick in our business since the financial problems began for the banks. Many CTO’s and CFO’s recognize that although they are locked into NetApp’s proprietary solutions, they can extend the lifespan of their NetApp Equipment by calling Zerowait and intiating our affordable support for their NetApp equipment.

By Riley McDermid Last update: 8:45 a.m. EDT June 24, 2008
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) – Financial firms may lose as many as 175,000 jobs in the next 12 months, a reduction that could exceed even the worst layoffs after the tech boom imploded in 2000 to 2003, a news report said Tuesday. “The worst is yet to come,” Russ Gerson, head of New York-based recruiting firm Gerson Group, told Bloomberg News. “We are going to have a major contraction. This is affecting all areas of the investment banking universe and it’s affecting all areas globally.” The market was roiled Monday by rumors that banks Citigroup Inc. (C:Citigroup, Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc may reduce their investment banking divisions by 10% as part of an effort by investment banks to reduce

As more of these companies are forced to lay off their experienced network engineers, Zerowait is increasingly handling more of their storage management and support requirements. To meet this demand for our services we are adding highly qualified network storage engineers to our staff . Providing affordable high quality service and support never goes out of fashion.

According to a Press release today FreeBSD is “providing key components ” of NetApp filers.

FreeBSD technology can be found throughout the IT industry, providing key components of Apple’s OS X, network infrastructure from Juniper, Nokia, IronPort and other vendors, storage appliances from NetApp and Isilon, and even appearing from time to time in Microsoft Windows, among many other products.

I wonder how much of the “magic” of NetApp Filers is made up of FreeBSD?

Yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine about which way he thought the big shots in Enterprise Storage companies would contribute to political campaigns. It is no wonder that billion dollar storage companies employees are willing to back their favorite candidates with donations. It is the way of the world. My buddy thinks that executives should contribute to the party that backs open markets and free trade since all the companies are engaged in global commerce and work with worldwide supply chains. I think that the executives of big companies are more pragmatic, and either contribute to all parties or the one that they feel can benefit their company the most.

Since we deal in the NetApp marketplace I was most interested to see where they contributed. Because NetApp has changed its name from Network Appliance recently you have to look in two places now. It turns out that EMC’s employees are much more generous to presidential campaigns in this race than NetApp’s:

Presidential race:
NetApp
Network Appliance
EMC
IBM

Lobbying firms are also well funded by the storage industry:

NetApp
Network Appliance
EMC
IBM

I think it is great that the executives of these companies get involved in politics, They have worked hard to build great companies and I hope that they are contributing to the people and parties that they believe can help their companies, employees, and stockholders the most.

Only the executives in the firms can judge whether they are getting a return on investment on their Lobbying efforts. NetApp does not seem to be spending very much on lobbying currently, in comparison to EMC and IBM. It will be interesting to watch and see if as they grow they invest more in lobbying.

A competitor called me up the other day and said some really nice things about our company and the loyalty of our customers. He wanted to know how we do it. I told him it was not easy. Looking back on the conversation I can say that it takes just as much effort to think big as to think small. Therefore, we always try to look at the big picture, while concentrating on the smallest details for our customers’ requirements.

To be a world class competitor in the high availability storage marketplace means we have to exceed our competitors on customer service, adaptability, innovation and product quality on every transaction. To keep our customers happy we work to adapt our systems to their needs, often it means looking at things a different way and creating new relationships to accomplish our goal of satisfying the customers requirements.

Creating a streamlined service and support business that provides the highest levels of customer support takes a lot of effort by our team. Our customers appreciate our efforts. We can tell because word of mouth recommendations are the biggest source of new customers for us.

Thank you for recommending us to your peers, we really appreciate it.

Why would an executive who was running a very successful division of a growing company jump ship? According to this press release NetApp’s storevault product was a very successful product.

“Last year, NetApp StoreVault S500 took top honors. As it turns out, the StoreVault went out on top — earlier this year the vendor announced it was folding its small and medium business StoreVault division into its FAS storage unit.

At the time, NetApp said combining the product lines would allow it to expand the StoreVault platform into remote and branch offices as an extension of it core product line. “

It seems odd for an executive to leave while his product is on top, and there is so much growth within the company, but here is the press release I saw yesterday.

“Krishnan joins Cupertino-based Parascale from five years at Sunnyvale-based NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP), where he was most recently general manager of the company’s StoreVault business unit that focuses on network storage appliances for mid-market businesses.

He was also general manager of NetApp’s Storage Management Software business, overseeing the company’s core management products. “

I never understood the product positioning of Storevault or its pricing model. NetApp is a high priced enterprise storage vendor, and selling a low priced solution never made sense to me. Perhaps others felt the same way. Sales folks will always sell to their commission schedule, and since Storevault was a low priced solution it was probably very hard to get sales to ramp up unless the commission schedules were enormous. But for most of its life it was only sold through NetApp’s convoluted channel, making selling the product even harder.

A Network Appliance solution provider working with that vendor’s StoreVault S500 entry-level storage array moved quickly to take advantage of a couple potential opportunities only to cry foul when he said he was thwarted by the vendor in pursuing those opportunities.

Ron Robinson, president and CEO of Innovative Technology Data Storage, an Atlanta-based storage solution provider, has been engaged with NetApp in a long-running battle over whether the vendor and its direct sales rep, who focuses his sales on NetApp’s FAS line of midrange and enterprise storage appliances, is unfairly preventing competition from Robinson selling the vendor’s entry level StoreVault line.

Robinson also accuses NetApp of violating its own dealer registration policy in the case of another customer who had been purchasing from a local solution provider but who was interested in making a deal with Robinson.

I hope Mr Krishnan learned a thing or two at NetApp and will apply his experiences to creating Parascale into a long term successful company.