Zerowait Corporation

Chuck Hollis of EMC on NetApp marketing techniques.
Click here or read below.

NetApp: Bad Marketing vs. Good Marketing

What percentage of your corporate storage is Spam?

The volume of spam rocketed in December to account for a record 94% of all Internet-sent e-mail during the month, a message security company said Wednesday.

“This continued rise in spam levels is threatening the viability of e-mail for businesses and is sapping the productivity of hundreds of millions of workers around the world,” said Daniel Druker, Postini’s executive VP of marketing, in a statement.

The portion of e-mail that Postini pegged as spam reached 94% in December, an all-time record. The company blocked 25 billion spam messages aimed at 36,000 clients that month, an increase of 144% over the same month in 2005.

Good question and you can’t trust the statistics.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.’ Disraeli

Why does NetApp charge so much for their equipment?

I get asked this all the time, and the answer is based on many factors but mostly it is because the market perceives a NetApp label to be worth more than the Seagate label, Intel label or Qlogic label. NetApp hardware is based on Common Off The Shelf equipment. Except for a few proprietary parts made by some of their contract manufacturers. The major value of their systems is in their software “OnTap” . However, thanks to transferable licenses you can buy this software at a deep discount. We can help you do this!

Customers can get deep discounts on NetApp hardware and software by shopping around . IBM discounts NetApp hardware and software substantially, and NetApp has been quoting their systems at levels of over 40% to many customers according to some of the quotes that we have seen recently from customers.

Some things never change ! If 2007 is the year you want to reduce your costs of NetApp acquisitions, get competitive quotes! Call us we will show you how!

Hitachi announces the arrival of 1TB drives.

A 1TB hard drive for $399 is likely to be an instant hit among early adopters and video pros. That price translates to about 40 cents per gigabyte, or 0.04 cents per megabyte. Compared to Seagate’s 750GB Barracuda 7200.10 drive—which comes out to about 60 cents per gigabyte and 0.06 cents per megabyte ($349.99 from Amazon)—and the 500GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K500—about 42 cents per gigabyte and 0.042 cents per megabyte ($209.95 from Amazon)—the DeskStar 7K1000 offers a slight value over the currently available competition.

Consider the implications to the enterprise raid manufacturers like EMC and Netapp of this announcement. Mirroring drives will provide redundancy and the price point will be extremely low. So NetApp and EMC will have to really ramp up the value of their features or get into other markets. Perhaps this is why they are pursuing every related market there is?

Has California Seceded from the United States and joined the European Union?

Security, Storage, and Delaware’s Senator Carper

Earlier this year Senator Carper was the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. Perhaps he now will become the committee chairman. Senator Carper has been focusing on Data Security, and in a world where Google is cataloging everything this is something we should all be concerned about. In the book 1984 Orwell‘s Big Brother was the totalitarian Government. It is strange to see that in today’s reality it is Silicon Valley companies that are becoming Big Brother .

“We used to just worry about people breaking into our homes or stealing our cars, but in the 21st century, we have to worry about people stealing our identities via computers and the Internet,” said Sen. Carper. “Given what we’ve seen happen recently with security lapses at the Veterans Administration and other financial institutions, it’s imperative that we write a national law to help protect consumers from being victims of identity theft. This bill would require all financial institutions, retailers and government agencies to maintain strong internal safety protections for the data they hold, to quickly investigate any security breach, and notify law enforcement, regulators and the public when there’s a real risk of harm.”

Data Security and in particular disk drive security is something the engineers at Zerowait know a lot about. In the coming year we look forward to seeing what develops in this arena. Will it be government or private enterprise that protects your privacy in the future?

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. – Gandhi

1) It was only a few years ago that people were telling us that it was impossible to develop a third party full service NetApp support organization.

2) As we picked up our first customers the NetApp sales folks would tell our new customers that there was no way that we could provide long term service and support contracts and 24/7/365 .

3) When we picked up customers like HP, CSC, IBM, RBS and many other strategic accounts NetApp started to notice us and their salesman would try to meet or beat our pricing, service and support levels.

4) We doubled our sales in 2006 and now we have a service depot in Manchester, England and we are looking to open one in Asia in 2007.

Have a great holiday!
Your friends at Zerowait.

More Bad news for Morgan Stanley
The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) has accused investment house Morgan Stanley of lying that millions of emails it possessed were lost in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The more things change the more they stay the same

Recently while at the SNW show in Orlando, I heard that NetApp was switching its shelf supplier from Xyratex to Dot Hill. When NetApp shifted its purchasing from Eurologic to Xyratex it was the root cause of Eurologic going out of business. Currently, NetApp represents about 50% of Xyratex’s business. That is a big chunk of business to lose.

Sticking with your strategic suppliers and building long term relationships is something that most companies profess to admire. NetApp says it wants its customers for the long term. Why would a company that professes its strategic relationships to its customers act tactically with its own suppliers? Can a company so focused on its own short term profits provide long term value to its customers?

Silicon Valley where Politics and Venture Capital Mix

It is always interesting to see who is contributing to Congressional representatives and see if it influences their votes. Silicon Valley’s representive seems to be a favorite of the Venture Capital firms. Interesting? You decide.

MIKE HONDA (D-CA)
Top Contributors

1 National Assn of Realtors $10,000
2 Laborers Union $8,500
3 Air Line Pilots Assn $7,500
3 Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers $7,500
3 National Venture Capital Assn $7,500
6 International Assn of Fire Fighters $7,000
7 Acorn Campus $6,200
8 Assn of Trial Lawyers of America $6,000
8 Ironworkers Union $6,000
8 Operating Engineers Union $6,000
8 Opnext Inc $6,000
8 Transportation Communications Union $6,000
13 Mele Assoc $5,848
14 Credit Union National Assn $5,500
15 McDonalds $5,100
16 American Federation of Teachers $5,000
16 Johnson & Johnson $5,000
16 National Air Traffic Controllers Assn $5,000
16 Service Employees International Union $5,000
16 Teamsters Union $5,000
16 United Auto Workers $5,000

How long do you want your data archive to be readable?

One of our friends just told us that NetApp will not allow their R100’s to run anything above Version 7.1 of Ontap. Is this true?

Can NetApp’s Nearstore line be considered a longterm solution ? Archiving should inherently be for a longer period than 3-5 years. Isn’t that what the regulators require in HIPAA & GLBA and SARBOX?

Zerowait will have the parts for these systems for many years to come so our customers can remain in compliance, but will NetApp, their software vendor, make their newer systems backwards compatible?