Zerowait Corporation

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.

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?