Zerowait Corporation

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.

Every company goes through its ups and downs, according to this report it looks like NetApp SAN solutions may be in for a rough ride. Only time will tell.
“It appears that NetApp’s move into the SAN market is meeting some resistance despite its dominant position in NAS,” the report’s analysis of the numbers reads. “On the plus side, just over 40% of the respondents that are candidates for NetApp’s SAN offerings have purchased or are planning on purchasing these products, up slightly from our August 2006 survey. However, the biggest shift between these two surveys is a steep decline in the number of respondents that are currently evaluating NetApp’s SAN offerings and a corresponding increase in current customers that are only planning on using its NAS products and have no plans to even evaluate its SAN lineup.”

Out of our large customer base of clients , very few are using filers as a NetApp SAN .

Does $50,000.00 a TB sound expensive to you?

NetApp’s newest software costs that much.
ReplicatorX is available now for $50,000 per Tbyte of replicated data.

Let’s do some simple math on a typical small NetApp system which has 10TB on it

10TB * $50,000.00 = $500,000.00 Doesn’t that sound expensive to you?

That is just for the software, you still need a second filer to replicate too!

I wonder what the commission structure is on that software!

If you think the Enterprise Storage business is nuts, just try to figure out Congress.

The strange world of enterprise storage

Something weird is going on here,” said Arun Taneja, founder and analyst with the Taneja Group, who said he’d been working with NeoPath since the company’s inception and had not been aware of the plan to discontinue the products. “For the life of me I can’t understand why NeoPath’s products would be end-of -lifed. It’s a good product. It’s functioning well.”

Perhaps the new owner of Neopath wants to sell its own proprietary solutions, or is about to come to market with its own solution?

How will a trade war with Asia affect your storage infrastructure?

1) Most of the components in enterprise storage systems are made in Asia.
2) Most of the assemblies in your storage infrastructure are made in Asia.
3) A lot of software engineering and technical design is done is Asia.

So when I read things like this from the Economist – I get a little worried.

After a long drawn out, and highly fraught, negotiation that pushed right up against the deadline, America and South Korea have inked a new trade deal. It is the largest America has signed since NAFTA. However, tensions between the Bush administration and resurgent protectionists in America’s new Democratic Congress make it highly uncertain that the pact will be ratified. In related news, China is protesting an about-face on anti-dumping suits by America’s Treasury department, which has resulted in punitive tariffs on paper products

Maybe it is time to write our Senators and Representatives, so they will stop this silliness?

What will your storage network look like in three years?
Brocade has some ideas that may change the cabling and wiring of your
storage infrastructure.
April 01, 2007 (Network World) — Brocade Communications Inc. this week announced plans to incorporate 10Gbit/sec Ethernet and iSCSI technology into its Fibre Channel switches.

“You are going to see us incorporate [Silverback’s 10Gbit/sec Ethernet and iSCSI technologies] and incorporate it into the infrastructure that we are filling out for the future of the data center,” he said

Interesting times.

Dell is caught in an accounting scandal

Is it possible for public companies to comply with all of the rules of the stock exchanges and Sarbanes Oxley any more?

An internal investigation into Dell’s accounts has uncovered “evidence of misconduct” and accounting errors, the struggling computer maker said on Thursday night.

Dell has done more to commoditize technology than just about any company. I would hate to see them go away.