Zerowait Corporation

Google releases significant research paper on Disk Failure.

Download it here

I wonder why NetApp has not done this research, or if they have why didn’t they release it? Perhaps they can do a follow up study on FC disks?

Is NetApp concerned that Huawei and Xyratex have teamed up? If Huawei is using the same storage subsystem provider as NetApp how long will it be before Huawei introduces a very similar product to NetApp’s? Suppose that NetApp’s Gross Margins remain high, Huawei’s interest in the enterprise stroage market is logical from a business perspective, and in the long run may produce competition for NetApp equipment. How similar will the Huawei equipment be to NetApp’s DS14 series of storage shelves? It will be interesting to see what hits the market from this team.

Storage is a priority for Huawei, according to the company’s spokeswoman Lynn Zhou. “Both storage and security are recognized within Huawei as areas of strategic importance as [telecom] operators move towards an all-IP network environment,” she said in an email to Byte & Switch.

Certainly, Chinese technology giants have been fleshing out their storage strategies. Huawei, for example, was teamed up with 3Com, and also forged partnerships with FalconStor, Intransa, iVivity, and Xyratex.

The Chinese connection may also explain NetApp’s rush into Bangalore India to lower its cost structure.

While I was visiting some of our customers last week I ran into a few that were actually told they could not use any more power by their Colo’s and their power companies. Coincidentally computerworld also noticed there is a problem. I have not seen any mention of how many BTU’s are saved because our lives are more efficient because we can work remotely now, I wonder what the trade off is between working at home, shopping from home and commuting to work and driving to the shopping mall?

Economic growth is going to require power. We are going to need more electrical power to run our infrastructures that is certain, are we going to build generating stations and power them with fossil fuel or nuclear power? Probably both.

Storage density can save a small amount of power in data centers and so that is what our customers in the situation are looking at. Below is an excerpt of the article.

February 15, 2007 (Computerworld) — Estimated electricity consumption by servers in the U.S. doubled from 2000 to 2005, when the systems consumed as much power as every single color TV in the country or all the electric devices used in the state of Mississippi — take your pick.

The growth in power use is due to increases in the number of servers being installed and stacked in data centers as demand for computer services accelerates, according to a paper written by Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has been advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on energy issues related to data centers.

Using server growth figures based on data from market-research firm IDC, Koomey estimated the amount of power consumed annually by servers and associated equipment, such as cooling systems and uninterruptible power supplies. Those technologies consumed 45 billion kilowatt hours nationwide in 2005, he wrote in his paper, which was funded by a grant from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Koomey expects power consumption to rise by another 75% by 2010. But he said in an interview yesterday that forecasting consumption is a little harder because it’s unknown how much demand for new computing services, such as a YouTube, will affect electricity use.

*************
Some folks just don’t care about their energy usage.

NetApp profit falls as expenses rise
By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
Last Update: 5:48 PM ET Feb 14, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Network Appliance Inc. on Wednesday reported a fiscal third-quarter profit that fell 13% from a year ago as the storage-technology company said that expenses rose and revenue exceeded analysts’ expectations.

From the you can’t make this up department –

… Sen. Ted Stevens, the man who described the Internet as a series of tubes: It’s time for the federal government to ban access to Wikipedia, MySpace, and social networking sites from schools and libraries.

And now some humor from Clive in London…..
Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace (and elsewhere)!!!

1. BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

2. SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.
3. ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard

4. SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

5. CUBE FARM : An office filled with cubicles.

6. PRAIRIE DOGGING : When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.

7. MOUSE POTATO : The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.

8. SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

9. STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

10. SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

11. XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.

12. IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.

13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

14. ADMINISPHERE : The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

15. 404: Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be located.

16. GENERICA : Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

17. OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake).

18. WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks.

Is there a windfall profits tax in Google’s future?

Will it hurt tech investment in R&D?

From US News and world report…..

… Why not confiscate a portion of Google’s fat annual profits–the company’s 2006 earnings were some $3 billion on revenue of $10.6 billion–and use it for some relevant national goal? The search-engine company is, after all, profiting from technological infrastructure it didn’t even build, an “information superhighway” (to use a quaint term) that came out of a government defense project. It’s time to pay Uncle Sam back. When Sen. Barack Obama officially announced his own presidential bid last weekend, he called for a new Internet initiative. “Let’s lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America,” Obama said.

So there you go. A portion of Google’s profits, as well as those perhaps from Amazon, Yahoo!, and eBay could be funneled into a government-managed fund to pay for laying down fatter pipe. Heck, it’s too bad that some candidate missed an opportunity back in 2004 to advocate the confiscation of home builders’ profits to help low-income renters buy their own McMansions. Of course, profits at Lennar, Centex, and Toll Brothers aren’t what they used to be, thanks to the housing bust. And if oil prices drop, neither will those at ExxonMobil or Chevron. And if the economy sinks, Google’s bottom line won’t look so healthy, either.

The thing, though, is that these targeted taxes don’t have a great track record. Look at what happened when oil companies were hit with the windfall profit tax that President Carter signed into law in 1980. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, as recently unearthed by the Tax Foundation, the windfall profits tax–a real bear to administer–had two nasty side effects: 1) It didn’t raise as much money as forecast. Instead of raising $320 billion between 1980 and 1989, it raised only about $40 billion; 2) the CRS determined that the windfall profits tax had the effect of decreasing domestic production by 3 to 6 percent. So the United States had to import more oil than it otherwise would have.

And that’s the big worry. Today’s earnings are tomorrow’s investments, both in exploiting hard-to-reach oil reserves and in alternative fuels. And in some cases, today’s earnings are what allow companies to make it through the lean times. Confiscating profits is hardly a pain-free way to finance new government spending.

Congress may already be undercutting Clinton’s plan. She views that “strategic energy fund” as payback from companies that have been benefiting from government subsidies. But the Democrats in Congress are already stripping out those subsidies as a way of paying for promotion of renewable fuels under new pay-as-you-go budget rules.

Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” works in mysterious ways….

Entertainment and Storage meet in Beverly Hills!

It looks like CNN’s Larry King and his wife are purchasing the President of Network Appliance Tom Mendoza’s House.

By Ben Casselman
From The Wall Street Journal Online

Talk-show host Larry King and his wife, Shawn Southwick, have agreed to buy a Beverly Hills home listed for just under $12 million.

The five-bedroom, Tuscan-style home was on the market less than two weeks before the couple agreed to buy it. The almost 10,000-square-foot house, built in 1989, has a skylit foyer and a master suite with a sitting room and twin bathrooms. There is also a two-bedroom guest house and a pool. Local agents identified Mr. King as the buyer. Listing agent Stephen Resnick of Westside Estate Agency confirmed that a contract has been signed, with the deal set to close later this month.

Mr. Resnick wouldn’t name the sellers but said they spent two years renovating the house. Records show the sellers are Thomas and Kathy Mendoza, who bought the home three years ago. Thomas Mendoza is president of Network Appliance, a Sunnyvale, Calif., data-storage company.

The King and Mendoza families declined to comment. Mr. King, 73 years old, is the longtime host of the CNN talk show “Larry King Live.” Ms. Southwick, 47, is a former host of the television show “Hollywood Insider.”

It would make an interesting interview on the Larry King show for Tom Mendoza to spend an hour answering questions on his company’s technology, future vision, and commitment to long term relationships for resellers, partners and customers.

Inquiring minds are wondering if Larry King will get transferable licenses with the purchase?

Andrew Carnegie
Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.

Is NetApp going to stand by its reseller partners for the long term?

Network Appliance chief executive officer Dan Warmenhoven warned partners they need to sell more of the company’s software and services or risk “being left behind” as the company grows.

“You have to lead with NetApp,” Warmenhoven said. “If you walk into an account with a NetApp relationship and are not leading with NetApp, then maybe that relationship will not be there in the future.”

Whatever happened to the Hard Deck mentioned in CRN for resellers that got so much press about two years ago?

Network Appliance is defining which customers can and cannot be approached by its direct-sales reps, CRN has learned.

Under the forthcoming Hard Deck program, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based vendor of SAN and NAS products will work with its channel managers and district sales managers to determine which customers throughout North America will be named accounts targeted mainly by direct sales and which will be channel-exclusive, said Leonard Iventosch, NetApp’s vice president of Americas channel sales.

Or this article…

Leonard began by telling me that he has been at NetApp for about five years. That means he came in at just about the same time that many channel partners were getting screwed by the company by having their primo accounts reassigned to direct-sales androids at the mother company. It is unclear whether Leonard had anything to do with this.

Is NetApp outsourcing more jobs to India? From an economics point of view I can understand the need to outsource technical requirements to a low cost provider. What will be the long term effect of this move on NetApp US based technical support? Does Netapp view their US technical staff as too costly? This will be an interesting story to watch over the next few years.

According to Tom Georgens, NetApp’s executive vice president and general manager of enterprise storage, India represents significant potential for the company and is one of the key markets marked for top investment this year.
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“NetApp has identified India as a strategic operation, and since NetApp has had a facility in India for some time, we have decided to grow this operation with additional investments and to leverage the vast pool of technical talent that exists in Bangalore to drive product innovation,” he said.

I wonder how it will impact their government contracts that require US content.

Genius is 1% inspiration & 99% perspiration– Edison

The other night I was reading about the Wright brothers and I came upon this statement:
Wilbur and Orville were sons of a church Bishop and a mother who viewed her fulltime duty as raising her children into healthy, strong adults with moral fiber and model Christian citizens. The brothers didn’t smoke, drink liquor or use swear words and never worked or flew their airplane on Sundays. Moral ambiguity was not a characteristic of their behavior.

Times have certainly changed since the early 1900’s . NetApp’s software is a play on words and called “OnTap” and in a recent patent they use the term “swizzling“ in reference to writing blocks and pointers in Patent # 7,130,873. I understand that great men like General U.S. Grant & Winston Churchill enjoyed a cocktail now and then, so why not the folks at NetApp? just for fun , count how many swizzles are in the next paragraphs.

FIG. 5 illustrates an on-the-fly swizzling process, indicated by general reference numeral 500, that implements “on-the-fly swizzling“. In on-the-fly swizzling, the BN pointers are swizzled while the image stream is being written to the destination file system. This type of swizzling updates the BN pointers as the storage blocks are written to the destination file system instead of performing the BN pointer update after all the storage blocks have been written. Thus, each block is only written once and often storage blocks can be arranged to be written in full RAID stripes. The on-the-fly swizzling process 500 initiates at a `start` terminal 501 and continues to an `iterate each block` procedure 503. The `iterate each block` procedure 503 initially reads and stores any provided information that can be used to map the storage blocks between file systems (such as the first block-list portion 405 and the second block-list portion 407) and then reads each block from the image stream. When all storage blocks are read from the image stream, the on-the-fly swizzling process 500 completes through an `end` terminal 505. A `BN block` decision procedure 507 checks each storage block against the block information in the first block-list (or equivalent) to determine whether the storage block contains a BN pointer. If the storage block does not contain a BN pointer, the on-the-fly swizzling process 500 continues to a `write block` procedure 509 that writes the block to the destination file system and the process continues to the `iterate each block` procedure 503 to process additional storage blocks or to complete.

I guess all this talk of swizzling means they like their drinks stirred at NetApp, and not shaken? Sometimes it takes me a few beers or cocktails to work my way through NetApp’s USPTO documents, how about you? On the other hand, the Wright brothers documents are easy to understand.

Check out the Wright brother’s patent of 1906
To all whom it may concern:
Be it known that we, ORVILLE WRIGHT
and WILBUR WRIGHT, citizens of the United
States, residing in the city of Dayton, county
of Montgomery, and State of Ohio, have in-
vented certain new and useful Improvements
in Flying-Machines, of which the following is
a specification.
Our invention relates to that class of fly-
ing machines in which the weight is sustained
by the reactions resulting when one or more
aeroplanes are moved through the air edge-
wise at a small angle of incidence, either by
the application of mechanical power or by
the utilization of the force of gravity.

The Wright brothers certainly were clear, concise and easy to understand.

Packaging is one of the most important parts of our business and we take pride in the quality of our packaging. Developing techniques and procedures to make certain that our equipment arrives at our customer sites in perfect condition takes a lot of effort. Developing the combination of packing materials is also quite an effort . It is worth it though, as we ship equipment all over the world and we have very rarely encountered damage to our equipment .