Zerowait Corporation

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” Groucho Marx

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=85225
Relentless IT security threats generated from viruses and worms, and legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, HIPAA and PCI require companies to deploy SIEM technology.

“There’s over 20,000 HIPAA complaints to (the Department of Health and Human Services), but zero civil enforcement actions so far,” says Swire. “If HHS refuses to enforce the law, then medical organizations will be less careful with patient data…”

Vendors are making products to protect companies from liabilities that may be associated with HIPAA, and selling these products using the famous sales 101 technique of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, but the Government is not enforcing the legislation. Without enforcement will equipment sales in this market space wither?

But the time we’ve made it, we’ve had it…. Malcolm Forbes

Success – Now watch as your market share declines!

In the late 1990’s NetApp’s NAS technology was an education sale. Zerowait’s employees worked very hard to teach our customers the value of NAS technology. It was a new view on storage and there was demonstrable value to NetApp’s solution. As the enterprise market accepted the solution NetApp’s stock price soared. But now the technology has commoditized, and many people expect that NetApp’s proprietary and expensive solutions will start to see a tremendous amount of competition for their market share. Just as Sun has taken a beating from Open Source, now the NAS companies are about to see the coming of open source into the enterprise. In the space of the next 24 to 36 months we can expect to see projects like www.freenas.org start creeping into the enterprise space. As soon as they get their snapshot like technology figured out, the value of proprietary NAS goes out the door, except for the service and support value. The premium price paid to the Proprietary NAS Vendors, will be eroded quickly by these projects.

It seems that Robin Harris, Jon Toigo, and I are not the only ones keeping an eye on these developments in open source NAS projects. If you are interested in real developments in NAS storage you should read this article from the storage forum.

How are NetApp and EMC going to compete against a price point of free in three years? Brand value and marketing can only can take you so far, just ask the Oldsmobile dealers.

A small problem at a vendor, can cause a big headache for NAS and SAN customers.

When a critical part of your data infrastructure is broken and your customers are unable to get their crucial data, your business can suffer lost sales and lowered revenues. And as a System Administrator you may lose your job! Which is why SA’s listen to the recommendations of their vendors’ Technical Engineers so closely when making architecture decisions. When a critical part is made by a vendor where former executives are accused of fraud, you may have to start considering how to rebuild and architect your storage infrastructure. Network Appliance has a long and fruitful relationship with Brocade, and many of our customers are wedded to the Brocade switches they have. But what will happen if Brocade collapses in the next 24 months? Who will support the hardware, software and firmware on these switches? What are your alternatives as a user if a critical component is no longer supported.

These are questions to think about, we all hope that Brocade overcomes its problems. Your vendor’s Executive decisions can have long term consequences for your critical storage infrastructure. In a highly integrated global economy a small disruption at a switch manufacturer may impact all of us.

Just something to think about.

Highly Valued storage on a commodity storage platform?

The other day I saw an email on The Toasters mailing list of NetApp users regarding the certification by Oracle of StoreVault – the new SMB aimed product by NetApp. I have not been in very many SMB business that are running Oracle, but I began thinking about the thought process that would allow a small business to spend big bucks on their Oracle implementation and then skimp on the hardware it runs on. It would seem that the SMB company that values its data so much would use high end hardware, not low end hardware. Perhaps NetApp’s high end units will suffer shrinking their sales volume if the low end box can be Oracle certified, and can deliver the performance, reliability and Snap Mirror that high end customers require.

Below is the email that got me thinking about all of this. Email me your thoughts.

http://toasters.mathworks.com/toasters/17609.html
Re: StoreVault 500
From: Tim XXXX(XXXXX@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2006 – 14:14:32 EDT
Eric,
To answer your question, the S500 is not yet Oracle certified but NetApp is
working on this.
Regards,
Tim
On 7/16/06, Eric XXXXX wrote:
good morning,
Thank you for this information,
do you (or somebody else on the list) know whether the StoreVault
product(s) are or will be certified for usage with Oracle database as
described in
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/htdocs/vendors.html
(“Network Appliance” is mentioned, not Data ONTAP).

Compliments for our Complementary support

I just got off the phone with a customer who was telling me that our service and support was fantastic and he can’t understand why NetApp doesn’t see our legacy support as a complementary service for their legacy filer customers. What is astonishing is that this is from a customer at one of the largest computer companies in the world, that is known for outstanding equipment, service and support to their customers.

We really appreciate hearing that our customers appreciate the efforts we put into making certain that they get the highest availability and best support possible for their NetApp equipment.

Thanks for the encouragement!

The other day, one of our engineers and I flew into CYTZ – Toronto Island Airport to visit with some of our customers in Toronto. I told our engineer that landing at Toronto Island provides some great opportunities for some pictures, and I think this is the best picture he took.

Having an airplane allows us to leave from our office, go to the local airport, get in our plane, and arrive at a customer’s offices in Toronto within four hours.

The meetings in Toronto went very well, and we are looking forward to making this trip again.

Ken Lay’s Golden Egg

Over the last few years we have heard a lot of complaining about Ken Lay in the media. But the Computer Storage business should try to make him into a Saint. Before the collapse of Enron the storage industry was happy to sell storage to Enron. After the collapse of Enron the Congress made a gift to the Storage industry by enacting Sarbanes Oxley. The act should have been known as the Storage Business and Accounting Firm Welfare Act, because storage became a sacred area that has to be secure and backed up, and backed up again, and again. And certified by the SARBOX auditors who know nothing about computer storage at all.

Only Congress could have enacted a worse travesty on American business than Ken Lay ever was.

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