Zerowait Corporation

Sun is getting ready to fight NetApp.

Watching the development of ZFS for the last few months this announcement was inevitable.

Sun to fry NetApp with FISH
Smells like NAS, dude
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View

This could become a very interesting battle between Sillycon Valley companies, I wonder if NetApp will pull out all of the Sun equipment it has in its data centers? A lot of NetApp’s resellers sell Sun Equipment. Will NetApp let its resellers sell competitive products from Sun?

It might be the time for NetApp’s resellers to clarify the following comments from NetApp to see if they can sell Sun equipment and NetApp equipment as the Sun equipment comes to market.

Solution providers who do not take advantage of NetApp run the risk of being left behind as that company continues to grow rapidly, Warmenhoven said. “If that doesn’t happen, you will be a less significant partner of ours,” he said last week. “Let’s scale together.”

On Wednesday, he clarified his comments by saying that a lot of channel partners have the tendency to sell less value-added products. “There’s quite a bit of disparity as to which partners take advantage of the opportunities and which do not,” Warmenhoven said. “We want our channel partners to be representatives of NetApp. It’s up to them to take the whole product line. Some, however, want to just flip the hardware, just take the P.O.”

As NetApp’s software sales continue to grow, solution providers who do not make software a part of their sales will lose out on many of the incentives NetApp offers, including training and rebate credits, Warmenhoven said. “We’ll see more and more of our programs tilted that way,” he said.

NetApp has no plans to punish or drop solution providers who don’t focus more on storage sales. “They’ll stay in the program because they do have a certain value to us,” Warmenhoven said.

What is a solution provider to do if Sun makes a similar statement to them? At the end of the day, the customers will get a better price because of the competition between these two titans. Perhaps NetApp will be forced to remove the software storage limits on it Filers to meet the competition. That would be a smart move!

“Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so. It is not so. It is so. It is not so.” — Benjamin Franklin

Over the last few weeks we have experienced a substantial increase in NetApp customers calling us to see if they are getting the best value from NetApp for new equipment. We are fans of NetApp equipment but think that they certainly should lower their prices to remain competitive in the marketplace. In my opinion , Computer Storage is commoditizing and NetApp is still trying to sell their equipment at a premium. It reminds me of the pricing models of companies like WANG, DEC, and SGI, who went into a sudden decline.

According to Search Storage end users are starting to turn away from NetApp equipment based on value and price – and talking about it in public.

Arias evaluated 3 terabytes (TB) iSCSI boxes using SATA drives from Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp), EMC Corp. and Siafu Software LLC on recommendation from his local value-added reseller (VAR). Siafu’s Swarm IP storage area network (SAN) appliance stacked up well in pricing against an offering he got from an IBM reseller offering a NetApp box priced at between $50,000 and $60,000. “That was with refurbished drives, too, at a pretty deep discount.”

Whether NetApp can change into a commodity storage vendor depends on whether they can cut their costs more. If they can’t, they will join so many other companies that had a proprietary operating system that couldn’t compete with cheaper solutions that emerged over time.

Only time will tell who wins this debate on storage valuations -Will NetApp win, or will their customers? In the long run I would bet on the customers and the marketplace.

No Hassles. Rest easy. Call Zerowait!

Last week I was at the ASCDI conference in Las Vegas and got a chance to hear how terrible it is to be a reseller of Sun Equipment. It seems that a majority of the folks in attendance at the show have something to do with Sun in one way or another. Sun has not been playing fair for the last few years and so the ASCDI has filed some paperwork in the UK to fight for free trade.
Here is a link to the ASCDI page of information

The ASCDI is pretty certain that it is going to win the action, and the law firm representing ASCDI thinks it will apply to all technology companies that have a command economy mentality to their parts support and distribution models. Sun is the biggest abuser, so it seems to be first on the list.

With all the talent that big companies in Sillycon Valley have you would think that they would hire some people with enough economics and business sense to recognize that consumers in any market will find a way to get the products at prices they desire. And that companies will spring up to fill the requests of these customers. But for whatever reason, Sillycon Valley technology companies generally don’t understand the dynamics of markets. IBM seems to be the one company that does understand the marketplace when it comes to marketing revenue from the secondary market of its own equipment, however their division that resells the NetApp re branded equipment are as blind to the profit potential of secondary parts sales and third party support as NetApp is.

I appreciate the hassles that NetApp and IBM are causing their customers in this market niche. If they made it easy for customers to work with them, customers would not be flocking to Zerowait for our service and support offerings. So if you are tired of being hassled by NetApp’s sales folks to purchase their latest and greatest marketing acronym fad upgrade, give us a call and we will help you maintain your current perfectly good equipment at a reasonable price, without any hassles!

Great Companies combine Innovation with Customer Focus.

I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine last night and we were comparing the NetApp of the mid to late 90’s to the NetApp of today. In the old days, NetApp seemed really concerned with technology and how it helped solve customer problems. My buddy was complaining because today’s NetApp is all about license fees and marketing limits on capacity and ways to milk his company for more money. Paying more for licenses means there is less money for staffing development and budget for raises to keep his good staff.

He asked ‘ What happened to the company that was all about innovations that helped the customer? I couldn’t answer that. I know a lot of the same people are still working there. I read Dave Hitz’s blog a lot and he seems to be still working there. Dave certainly does not seem to be engaged in the programming anymore, from his blog he seems to acting more like a marketing droid. Dave and I have not talked in years, although he writes to this blog occasionally, perhaps he can clarify?

My buddy said ‘NetApp had a great technology that hit the market at the right time, can they maintain leadership in a market that is rapidly commoditizing?’ I replied that that I would keep an eye out for companies that can sell at a commodity price a package of Sun ZFS, cheap JBODs, and Seagate or Hitachi 1 TB or above drives. When 2 or 3 of these companies hit the market a real fight will begin.

When these commodity solutions hit the enterprise marketplace EMC , NetApp and the other SAN & NAS packagers will be in for an SGI/ DEC/ WANG type of business decline. Because they won’t be able to justify their price delta, since they are all selling the same drives.

Technology can be a harsh mistress, therefore I would bet on the company that has the lowest cost solution that answers their chosen market’s needs the best.

Our technology and processes provide our customers with a competitive advantage!

In order to provide our customers with better service than the OEM does we had to develop faster and better systems for service and support. At first these systems were developed to allow us to compete against other people in the third party service and support business. But as the years went by some of these system became stand alone products like the ZHA Exception Reporter.

Exception Reporter gives our customers a competitive advantage and also provides us with better visibility into the failure rates of system components.

Competition is the mother of invention!

“first do no harm” – from the Hippocratic oath ( well, sort of).

Don’t you wish that Enterprise storage vendors felt that way? It seems that many companies believe that storage vendors don’t care about the damage they cause their customers, they only care about their quarterly sales numbers.

From Byte and Switch….

The survey of 387 users, many from large financial outfits, the bellwether of user satisfaction for many industry suppliers, shows that customers are using more vendors and liking them less. Just four percent of respondents from large companies trust their vendors enough to take their word on a fix. And a shocking 47 percent of those polled said vendor-recommended upgrades either didn’t solve a problem or made it worse.

It seems storage suppliers are doing their customers as much harm as good.

The media seems to be picking up what we have been reporting on this blog for a while now. Which is that the Enterprise storage vendors are successfully destroying their trust relationships with their customers in a quest for more systems sales and revenue growth. Maybe this is one reason why alternative support companies like Zerowait are growing so fast.

The manufacturer’s really need to work on gaining the trust of their customers, currently 96% of their customers don’t trust them. Just four percent of respondents from large companies trust their vendors enough to take their word on a fix.

I would say that the storage vendors have a real problem on their hands.

The tighter your grip, the fewer seeds of grain you can hold in your hand.

Yesterday I was in NYC visiting with clients that were furious at NetApp’s escalating costs of maintenance, and also the pace of change on ESH’s and LRC’s which make NetApp’s storage shelves more and more proprietary. These customers recognize that by making things more proprietary NetApp intends to lock them into NetApp’s technology. But NetApp has squeezed these clients too hard, and now they are actively shopping for alternative sources of maintenance for their NetApp hardware and looking for Commercial Off The Shelf Storage solutions for future storage purchases.

Most of the seeds that drop out of a tightened grip are scattered, but a few take root and grow. Zerowait’s business continues to grow by offering clients an affordable alternative to NetApp service and support. I guess we are a lucky seed.

Unintended consequences of disk to disk back up.

Recently a number of our clients have been told that they can’t get any more power into their data centers. After asking some questions, I found that a number of them have changed from tape backups to disk to disk back up. They use tape for archiving.

As these clients now realize the Disk to Disk solutions were great on paper, but the extra disk and the extra cooling required for the spinning media caught up with them on the power side of their infrastructure.

Free Unlimited Power is not available to everyone yet, and so tape may remain a good answer for companies that do not have an unlimited power supply available to them for some time into the future.

I wonder when we will see a whitepaper from EMC or NetApp discussing power consumption of Disk to Disk back up as compared with Tape backup?

NetApp and HP are after the same market segment. The SMB market.
Hewlett-Packard has a major crush on the small and medium-sized business market and has announced a new model in its All-in-One Storage line and shuffled some executives to help prove it.

The new data storage system joins StorageWorks AIO400 and 600, which have 1TB and 1.5TBs capacity respectively and debuted at around $5,000.

I think I will bet on HP to win this battle, as even NetApp’s storevault resellers admit there is a problem with NetApp’s marketing.
Urso said. “When I talk to small businesses, they know EMC and Dell, but not NetApp.”

I think HP knows a lot more about selling high volume, commodity profit items then NetApp does. Ultimately , the storage marketplace will decide.

Has IBM tired of dancing with NetApp?

I have always thought it strange that IBM would be a reseller of NetApp equipment, making very marginal rates of return for its stockholders. It just makes more business sense for IBM to own and sell their own NAS products because they could own the Intellectual Property. It may be that IBM was using the NetApp product line to learn how to sell into the departmental NAS market niche, where NetApp is strongest.

If IBM has decided to dominate the departmental NAS space, the rumors of an IBM acquisition of Falconstor make a lot of sense.

Wall Street analysts said that IBM has been looking at this acquisition for some time but has been waiting for FalconStor to get real traction. “That time would seem to be now,”

Only time will tell.