Zerowait Corporation

What is Apple up to?

One of our readers sent this…

“Apple has seeded version 1.1 of ZFS (Zettabyte File System) for Mac OS X to Developers this week. The preview updates a previous build released on June 26, 2007.

In the release notes, Apple confirms that the original release of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) will only offer Read-Only ZFS. As a result, no ZFS pools or filesystems can be modified or created under 10.5.0. This developer’s preview enables full read/write capability, including the creation/destruction of ZFS pools and filesystems.

ZFS is described as “a fundamentally new approach to data management. We’ve blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that’s actually a pleasure to use.”

The initial version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is rumored to be released on October 26th, 2007. It’s unclear when Leopard will incorporate full Read/Write ZFS support, but it seems clear that Apple is working on adding this functionality.”

Apple seems to be taking a strategic approach to a lot of things lately. Their consumer electronics work almost flawlessly, and their Laptops are so much nicer than PC’s, could they be taking baby steps into the storage marketplace? Can they build a sustainable enterprise storage business at consumer electronics price points?

Also this is interesting

“Failure is the only opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” Henry Ford

Sun has announced that it is going to vigorously go after the storage market now, and I think it’s new ZFS product is a great way to do it. It seems that every couple of days we have customers asking us about the viability of the Sun Thumper as a storage platform and whether Sun will support it strategically for a term of three, five, or seven years.

According to Sun’s President.
” I’m radically increasing Sun’s focus on storage today.”

“Why? Because the market’s only going to grow, for as long as we’re on this earth, and I believe our talent and assets give us a big sustainable advantage – that we’re planning on exploiting. Aggressively. “

The issue as I see it is whether Sun can commit to a long term marketing, sales and support strategy or not. Our customers clearly want to partner with a company that takes a long term view of their strategic infrastructure investments and is not just driven by the commission cycle of its sales teams. If Sun can truly implement a strategic long term service and support strategy there are many customers ready, but if Sun continues to send sales people who are merely box sellers into the field an opportunity for long term stable growth in the storage market will probably be squandered.

Therefore, I have a couple of questions for Sun’s president –
1) How are you compensating your newly revamped storage sales team?
2) Will you be compensating your sales people with higher commissions on long term service and support contracts than you do for selling hardware ?
3) Can you clearly define the efforts Sun is making to align your sales goals with your prospective customers long term storage strategies?

Can NetApp Compete with Western Digital and Iomega on the Small Business and Medium Business market?

Data Storage News
24 September 2007
Speed boost for external storage
By Chris Mellor, Techworld

“Western Digital and Iomega have introduced better external storage products for small and medium enterprises.”

“The MyBook Office Edition from Western Digital has from 320GB to 1TB of storage in a paperback-book-sized desktop enclosure. It connects to a host server or PC by USB 2.0 and offers automatic and continuous backup. Working files can be set so that any change to them is backed up, thus providing continuous data protection.”

“The Pro NAS 150d Server is also a rackmounted product and offers up to 3TB of storage plus the Windows file services support.”

“They also offer hot-swap drives and Retrospect backup software. The 200r additionally has CA eTrust Antivirus software and BrightStor ARCserve OEM edition with Disaster Recovery.”

“Both products support file access by Windows, Unix and Linux clients. The 150d 3TB Server is shipping now for $1,699 (about £850 at ordinary conversion rates). The 200r 1TB Server will be available later this month for $1,899 (about £950). The NAS 200r 1TB Server with Print will also be available later this month for $2,499 (about £1,250).”

It seems that the price delta on the FAS2050 and FAS2020 for the general SMB marketplace may be too high. But there are specific segments that may need a NetApp solution, but then since they use the Intel Celeron and have very little memory it may be hard to find those niches.

The market or government intervention will determine the winners over time.

There may be affordable solutions coming for transporting storage mirrors and archives over longer distances.

From the Wall street Journal

“”We can no longer rely on last-generation technology, which has essentially remained unchanged for 40 years, to power Internet performance,” says Mr. Roberts, who is 69 years old. Last month, his start-up, Anagran Inc., introduced a piece of gear called the flow router that he says can help modernize the Internet. The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission.”

“Mr. Roberts isn’t the only networking pioneer dissatisfied with earlier achievements. Len Bosack, the 55-year-old co-founder and former chief technology officer of networking giant Cisco Systems Inc., helped commercialize routers, the core piece of networking equipment that allows computers to communicate with one another. Yet he now terms such gear “less and less adequate” for today’s Internet needs. Last month, his company, XKL LLC, unveiled a system that allows businesses to connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times the capacity of current telecommunications pipes.”

Is there a possibility that these companies can work with large storage users to make affordable mirrors possible?

Conventional Wisdom is often wrong, but sometimes it is related to NetApp storage.

In this week’s Economist is an article called Advanced biofuels Ethanol, schmethanol ..

“Everyone seems to think that ethanol is a good way to make cars greener. Everyone is wrong

SOMETIMES you do things simply because you know how to. People have known how to make ethanol since the dawn of civilisation, if not before. Take some sugary liquid. Add yeast. Wait. They have also known for a thousand years how to get that ethanol out of the formerly sugary liquid and into a more or less pure form. You heat it up, catch the vapour that emanates, and cool that vapour down until it liquefies.

The result burns. And when Henry Ford was experimenting with car engines a century ago, he tried ethanol out as a fuel. But he rejected it—and for good reason. The amount of heat you get from burning a litre of ethanol is a third less than that from a litre of petrol. What is more, it absorbs water from the atmosphere. Unless it is mixed with some other fuel, such as petrol, the result is corrosion that can wreck an engine’s seals in a couple of years. So why is ethanol suddenly back in fashion? That is the question many biotechnologists in America have recently asked themselves.”

The article goes on to explain how Dr. Craig Venter is involved in the Biofuel efforts,
“These firms, however, have one other competitor. His name is Craig Venter. Dr Venter, a veteran of biotechnological scraps ranging from gene patenting to the private human-genome project, has been interested in bioenergy for a long time. To start with, it was hydrogen that caught his eye, then methane—both of which are natural bacterial products. But now that eye is shifting towards liquid fuels. His company, modestly named Synthetic Genomics (and based, unlike the others, on the east side of America, in Rockville, Maryland), is reluctant to discuss details, but Dr Venter, too, is taken with the pharmaceutical analogy. Indeed, he goes as far as to posit the idea of clinical trials for biofuels—presumably pitting one against another, perhaps with petroleum-based products acting as the control, and without the drivers knowing which was which.”

And Dr Venter’s company is a big user of NetApp equipment and often hosts the DC NetApp user group. And so there you see a relationship between Biofuel research and NetApp storage.

Former Network Appliance Manager Charged With Embezzlement – US Attorney
….Here is the link
Posted on Wednesday, September 26, 2007

LAWFUEL – Former Transportation Manager of Network Appliance Corporation Charged Over $ 90,000 in Personal Expenses to Corporation

SAN JOSE – United States Attorney Scott. N. Schools announced that Bernadette Escue, the former Global Transportation Manager of Network Appliance Corporation, (“Network”) was charged yesterday afternoon with wire fraud. According to the Information filed in San Jose federal district court, Ms. Escue, 41, used her position to embezzle over $90,000 by charging personal expenses to her company charge cards.

According to the Information, Ms. Escue was Network’s Global Transportation Manager and worked in Network’s Sunnyvale, California facility. The Information states that between February 2001 and October 2003, Ms. Escue fraudulently charged over $90,000 in personal expenses on Network corporate credit cards, including $12,900 for her son’s tuition at a private high school in San Francisco.

Joseph Fazioli is the Assistant United States Attorney who is prosecuting the case with the assistance of Legal Assistant Susan Kreider. The prosecution is the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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Another Link in SF paper.

Congressional Earmarks for SAN’s.

Nothing should surprise us anymore…

Storage Area Network Earmark

“$1,000,000 to Eisenhower Medical Center for Storage Area Network”

Sponsor: Rep. Bono (R-CA)

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Storage Area Network Earmark

“$3,000,000 to University of California – Redlands for Spintronics Memory Storage Technology”

Sponsor: Rep. Lewis (R-CA)

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What was your favorite OnTap version?

This is an interesting question lately because the multiple releases of version 7 and all the patches remind many users of the updates of MS Vista. According to this article MicroSoft is letting folks downgrade to XP from Vista.

Here is an article on this new MS policy:

“While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a “downgrade” option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP….

“The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets. “

So what was your favorite OnTap version? Was it stable and secure? Why not let customers choose to stay with an older version of software? Perhaps NetApp can offer older versions for a reduced price, and let the customers who want to be early adopters of new software pay more. Buggy software costs more to support, and therefore NetApp would probably like to charge more for it.

Imagine the conversation over the coffee pot between two storage managers.

Engineer 1 says, ” I really liked the old stable versions of Ontap that ran on the Alpha chip systems.”
Engineer 2 says, ” I really like the challenge of debugging software with NetApp engineering so I just paid more to be a guinea pig testing the new software.”

I wonder if a storage manager values stability more than all the new features.

Is IBM thinking outside the box?

Which will generate more revenue in a free software world – hardware services or software services?

The recent announcement that they will join the open office movement and dedicate 35 engineers to the project requires one to ask where is the revenue going to come from to pay for this model. Is IBM considering giving away the software but charging for remote hosting of documents? This seems to be what Google is getting into.

See here about IBM …

“Implementing the XML based file and display formats of the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) specification, Lotus Symphony will be based upon software written by the Open Office coalition, which IBM has joined along with Sun, Google and others. Last week IBM announced that it has dedicated 35 developers to contributing code to Open Office.”

It looks like IBM is trying to break Microsoft’s Vendor Lock in

“By joining Sun and Google to develop and promote open source software products implementing ODF, IBM adds welcome resources and marketing power to lure users away from the high costs and vendor lock-in of Microsoft Office.

IBM executives compare its ODF initiative with the support it gave to the open source system Linux by promoting its use in corporate data centers, support that helped make Linux very successful over the last several years.”

Does anyone know if Google uses IBM storage on their pay for storage solutions?

See here…
“Google suddenly began offering upgrade plans beginning at $20 per year for 6 extra gigabytes. Not quite in the nick of time and not exactly free, but I’ll take it.”

Do you think the marketers at IBM are thinking about giving away their storage software if you purchase their hardware? Sort of like the Razor blade model of revenue, give away the shaver and charge for the blades.

Is this strategic thinking?

In 2005 NetApp instituted its hard deck program, and now in 2007 NetApp is instituting a new Foundation for its sales program. It looks pretty much like the old program to me.

In 2005
“Besides its channel programs, NetApp will soon introduce new channel-specific product bundles, including its first iSCSI bundle and an upgrade to its Fibre Channel bundle. The bundles offer good margins without the need for special pricing, Iventosch said.”

In 2007
“The first thing that NetApp has done is created a series of base system configurations that reflect more the way people are actually buying and paying for their products, rather than the way most bundles have been created in the past–which usually reflect deals on products that the vendor is trying to move in the absence of real demand. The base configurations are flexible, however in that there are still enough a la carte options to allow the solution provider to order a customized solution without having to haggle over every unique element of the bundle.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that NetApp resellers want to make a reasonable profit on their services, it seems that resellers were trying to make a profit two years ago with NetApp products and they are still struggling to make a profit.

See here…
“When you put all this together, Ivantosch appears to be doing something radical in the channel. He’s trying to make NetApp a pleasure to do business with in the channel. Time will tell if he’s successful, but after years of watching vendors consistently fail to create programs that enhance the business models of their partners, the NetApp approach is a refreshing change.”

What is a surprise is that NetApp considers renaming their programs and using different words is somehow considered a radical change in Silly Con Valley.