Zerowait Corporation

NetApp invests in Qlusters.

I thought this is an interesting development because NetApp, HP, and IBM are all partners of this company that former Dell CEO Kevin Rollins is running. See here

I wonder how much longer it will be before Hitachi and EMC invest? : )

Brocade’s former CEO is going to jail, he focused on personal short term profits, and not long term company value. And he is going to pay the price for it.

I put together some random thoughts on this issue below.

I guess they found one of the witches NetApp’s CEO was talking about here ...

In Silicon Valley the worry is what will happen to the NHL Sharks.
“Reyes conviction could threaten Sharks’ ties
By David Pollak
Mercury News
Article Launched: 08/07/2007 07:24:21 PM PDT
Greg Reyes’s conviction Tuesday could end his role as a major investor with the ownership group that operates the Sharks.

The Storage consumers of the world may be interested in other aspects of this, and how it affects companies that are represented in their data centers….

From the San Jose Mercury –

Another take from Robin Harris –
“This has no impact on the Brocade of today, other than their culture is a direct descendent of the company that Mr. Reyes built. Like EMC, Brocade was a sales-focused culture with a “whatever it takes” mentality. They achieved fast growth for a time but are floundering because they handed their future over to storage OEMs who could care less if Brocade lives or dies. Their strategy is in worse disarray than EMC’s while their core fibre channel business is starting to decline.

I hope they can turn it around, but I’m more than dubious. Most of the world doesn’t need fibre channel and there are better places to buy Ethernet and Infiniband.”

IMHO – When any company’s executive staff is focused on short term personal gain rather then long term shareholder and customer value decisions are going to be made that attempt to lock in customers to a proprietary technology. When dealing with this type of company customers need to understand what the objectives of the executive and majority shareholders are. Investing in technology that will not be supported for the long strategic term will eventually cost customers more money after they are forced to upgrade.

Why independent monitoring & review is so important.

Over the last few weeks a couple of very large companies have embraced our ZHA Exception Reporter monitoring tool. There are a few reasons for this but the primary reason is that these companies realized that NetApp monitors their autosupports with a different perspective than the customer does. NetApp uses Autosupport to help them convince their customers to purchase more equipment or a system upgrade. Zerowait and our customers use ZHA Exception Reporter monitoring to help them get the most ROI out of their current NetApp storage.

Zerowait’s business is the maintenance, management and support of NetApp filers. We do not sell new NetApp equipment – our focus is on the long term support of Filers. Therefore, our business focus is on providing the most ROI from your storage investment. Our independence allows us to help you maintain your equipment for the long term at a very reasonable price.

If you want to learn more about our ZHA Exception Reporter monitoring you can go to this link.

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.