Zerowait Corporation

Customers are our best sales people

Last month I was visiting with a customer in California, and he told me how much of a pleasure it is to work with Zerowait. We were having dinner at a very nice restaurant, and the customer went on to tell me that he knew he was not our largest customer, but he felt that he was always given priority service and support whenever he called us about a service issue or about an upgrade. He wanted to tell me how much he appreciated the efforts we put into servicing his account. As the dinner went on he wanted to know where he fit into our account structure. I told him that many of our accounts are Fortune 100 accounts and that several of our accounts are in the 6 figure a year range, and indeed he was a smaller account for Zerowait. I explained that it is just as important to have long term customers as big customers, and we really appreciate his telling his friends and system administrator peers about our company. Most of our business growth has been through referral and recommendation and this organic growth has been very good for us.

As the evening went on he wanted to know how we developed our expanding NetApp monitoring, maintenance and management services. I told him that most of the ideas for the monitoring and maintenance service came from our customers, and that one of our semiconductor customers actually helped us to formalize our services and come up with program names so they would smoothly fall into the customer’s capital and operational budgets. The management programs we developed are based on the needs of a variety of customers who wanted us to manage their upgrades and systems at remote sites. Managing data migrations has become a very big aspect of our service business, and it is growing because people know we do it well.

As dinner wound down he wanted me to make certain that I thanked our engineers when I returned to our offices for all of the help they had provided him. He told me that with Zerowait support, storage is not a problem and the costs of storage growth are quite reasonable. He also told me that he had been talking to a friend of his and they were going to request a quote from us soon. Sure enough the next day my office had a Request for Quote from his friend which we bid on.

Customers really are our best salespeople, and we really appreciate their help!

Now one Appliance can Toast, Griddle and make your Coffee! Buy one today!

Last month I was visiting with a customer who has a considerable investment in his NetApp storage infrastructure. Management of his storage is becoming cumbersome because it has become a general purpose storage appliance. Storage is growing inversely to the staff’s ability to manage their storage resource. All they can do is continue to buy more raw storage and incorporate it into their general purpose volumes.

How many storage administrators are stuck storing everything and anything that is sent their way? Can an appliance do everything well? Of course not! But when storage administrators are forced to run a storage landfill specialization and performance seem to be of tertiary importance. Keeping the line of trash running and making certain there are no leaks is primary .

Jon Toigo speaks often about the need for Storage management, I think the time has come to start paying attention.

In many ways storage has become a landfill, that works good enough for most applications. Specialized appliances for High Availability and High performance storage will be coming soon, because people keep storing their trash with their customer, business & accounting records.

“To err is human. To blame it on somebody else is even more human.” Arthur Bloch

Yesterday one of my readers suggested I read the Blog of Dave Hitz. Dave is a founder of NetApp and has made a lot of money with his ideas and the ability of his staff to create and market his ideas to the world’s storage markets. It is because of his success that Zerowait is a vibrant, growing company servicing the legacy products that his company created but no longer wishes to maintain.

What concerned me was this comment on his blog.

“One of my frustrations with capitalism is that – on average – corporations seem much less interested in doing what’s right than individuals. (Perhaps spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations somehow inhibit moral behavior. Topic for another blog.) “

Dave has the power to change his company’s sales and marketing tactics, after all he is the founder of his company. If he is frustrated he should work to change the company from within. Dave can insist that marketing & Sales presentations are honest, he can and he should. A business’s ethics start at the top and filter down through the ranks.

Long term value in any company depends on integrity as perceived by its customers, vendors and employees. Zerowait provides disaffected NetApp customers with high availability and affordable monitoring, maintenance and management for legacy NetApp equipment. Our customers recognize that we provide the tools to get the most value out of their storage infrastructure with our service and support solutions. Ask our customers, they will tell you !

It looks like the folks at Sun are going to get serious about going after NetApp’s NAS position in the market. Over the last year it seems to me that NetApp is focusing on SAN installations more, which may create an opportunity for SUN.

This article hints at what might be coming out.

Murdock also refused to talk about Sun’s FISHworks project – billed as a NetApp killer.

Sun has put some of its top Solaris engineers in charge of a software/hardware effort meant to create a solid network attached storage (NAS) appliance. The company demoed this project to analysts early this year, although it refuses to give reporters the same honor.

Jeff Browning explains NetApp Snapshots and the trade off’s in this blog entry very well.

It is worth reading the whole blog, his explanations are better than anything I could write.

Here are some short excerpts…

“NetApp’s snapshots actually occurred as a result of serendipity (i.e. a happy accidental discovery). The design of NetApp snapshots is as an artifact of the design of NetApp’s file system called WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout).”

“WAFL is so named because it never overwrites existing blocks in place when updates occur. Instead it writes new blocks containing the updated data, and then frees the old blocks. Therefore, a snapshot can be assembled by simply retaining the old blocks rather than freeing them. No additional I/O is required to do this, which leads to NetApp’s accurate claim that their snapshots have no write penalty.”

Over the last few months there has been a significant increase in the interest in Load Balancing as a solution customers are looking at to provide high availability to their internal users and external websites. Coincidentally, the folks at Barracuda Networks have brought to market a new lower priced load balancing solution than that offered by the big players in the content delivery marketplace.

From the conversations we have had with our customers it looks like there will be an up tick in the usage of Load balancing to provide reliable disaster prevention solutions for a number of our customers.

The pendulum seems to swing back and forth between network bottlenecks and storage bottlenecks every few years. It could be that we are seeing this happen again now.

Round Numbers are Always False – Samuel Johnson

Lately I have seen a lot of babble about Green Data Centers. Cristóbal Conde, says…
“According to some reports, the energy consumption of server systems doubled between 2000 and 2005. Companies now spend as much as 10 percent of their technology budgets on energy. “

Eliminating spam on your Storage that keeps your email is an obvious way to reduce your requirements for disk space. One way to do that is to teach your users what the Delete key does, another way is to start spam filtering. At Zerowait, we use the Barracuda Spam firewalls and we find them to be quite nice, and really affordable also. If you have not looked at a Spam firewall yet, it might be time to start thinking about what your costs are for storing all the Spam on your mail server. If you are after a reduction in spinning media on your storage system this might help. But I don’t know if it will actually save you any power. It will make your Email administration easier though.

Are load balancers disruptive to NetApp software licensing fees?

One of our customers has been asking questions about whether they should take the plunge into NetApp metro clusters. And at first glance the technology looks pretty interesting. But then we remembered that Jeff Browning, the former NetApp engineering big shot, mentioned that NetApp clusters run as a Java Virtual machine, and he implied that it is not a very elegant solution. It works though. As Jeff says…
NetApp’s version: In the event of failure, the OS environment representing the failed member of the cluster reboots inside a virtual machine environment on the surviving member, running under, you guessed it, Java. Then this virtual machine Java thingy takes ownership of its storage objects, and continues whatever it was doing. With lots and lots of overhead. Goody!

When we reviewed the costs of the licenses that are required and compared that to the costs of reconfiguring the network to use Load balancers and two sites with snapmirror, the costs seem to favor a load balanced scenario.

NetApp likes to talk about disruptive technologies, but in some ways an old technology like load balancing might be disruptive to their pricing model.

Can NetApp improve its cluster technology and lower its costs? Can an old technology like Load balancing and some network engineering produce higher reliability at a lower cost? Disruptive technology works in strange ways, especially when customers are driven to reduce the cost of their storage infrastructures.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.– Mark Twain’s Autobiography

I found this article interesting, in light of recent articles about NetApp’s problems with its channel partners.

Warmenhoven declined to comment on whether orders from customers had recovered to normal levels after an abrupt decline in April led NetApp to forecast a 6 percent to 7 percent drop in revenue from the fiscal fourth quarter to the current first quarter.

The company has cut back on hiring following the order decline, said Warmenhoven, adding about 200 employees in the current quarter compared with 400 in the fourth fiscal quarter. Still, Warmenhoven said he is optimistic about the NetApp’s prospects.

While traveling around Silicon Valley, I noticed that NetApp seems to be still building in its complex on Java Drive. So they must not be expecting the slowdown to last long.

The truth about NetApp partnerships leaks out… incrementally

An article in CRN seems like deje vu to Zerowait who also had deals with JPL that NetApp decided we couldn’t handle once we had established the account and had already sold them plenty of equipment. The registration program has always been a joke and nothing has seemed to have changed in the unnecessarily adversarial relationship between NetApp and its VAR’s.

NetApp has always treated VAR’s as a missionary sales force only valuable for “incremmental sales”, and once a good customer is found they take the future deals for themselves, leaving the VAR with nothing but a lot of wasted effort.

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.

In the first deal, Innovative visited long-time NetApp FAS customer Cingular, as the wireless division of AT&T is still commonly referred to, and found interest in multiple units of the StoreVault for use as low-cost remote backup appliances, Robinson said.

While Cingular was planning to purchase FAS 270 arrays direct from NetApp, Innovative registered the deal as a StoreVault deal. “But then the NetApp rep heard that we were talking to Cingular, and didn’t like it,” Robinson said. “So Cingular called us to stop the deal.”

The reason was simple, Robinson said. “The NetApp reps had no vested interest in selling the StoreVault,” he said. “If they sell FAS or another solution, they don’t want the customer to see other low-cost solutions.”

Ed Smith, the local NetApp FAS sales rep, told NetApp’s local StoreVault sales rep that Innovative can’t go into Cingular with StoreVault, Robinson said. “The local NetApp sales rep doesn’t like me because I sell the S500 against them even though its all NetApp product.”

This is priceless…

As for Krishnan’s excuse that NetApp didn’t know what department at JPL was looking to make the StoreVault deal, Robinson said he presented all the relevant information to NetApp when registering the deal.

“Every opportunity is an RFP (request for proposal) number,” he said. “And this partner opportunity had an RFP number. If you call the buyer, he will tell you the buyer called us. Part of the deal registration process is to submit detailed information, which we did: the buyer’s name, department, phone number, etc. All that information is part of submitting for deal registration on-line.

“When NetApp says that, why don’t they pick up the phone and call the buyer that called me? Nobody did. They can pick up the phone as easily as I did.”

NetApp sales model is based on selling boxes, not long term relationships.