Zerowait Corporation

NetApp VP says NetApp is working to reduce storage costs.

Are they reducing their costs of hardware support? No
Are they extending the life of your legacy equipment ? No

They are going to sell another piece of hardware & software to reduce your costs!

“This announcement is about NetApp providing customers with a holistic solution to help them gain control over escalating costs and risks associated with unstructured data,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products and Alliances at Network Appliance. “With this software introduction, we are extending our portfolio of solutions to help customers reduce the amount of time normally required to manage compliance-related storage management tasks and tiered storage migration.”

At Zerowait we work on reducing your storage costs by lowering your costs for NetApp storage support and maintenance. And as we get more and more customers our support prices are reduced further. Because as we grow our inventory, our cost for support goes down and we pass that savings on to you. If you are looking to extend the life of your NetApp storage or affordably add storage to your infrastructure give us a call, you will be glad you did.

Traveling home from San Francisco today!

It has been a productive week in the bay area, we saw 12 clients and caught up with old friends at the brewery in Burlingame. I have to leave in a few minutes to stand on long lines at SFO airport before I get on my flight home. It looks like a lot of our customers will be meeting us at the Reno Air Races this year. If you are interested in Big Engines and fast planes you should check out www.airrace.org.

The industry consolidates a little bit more.
BOSTON (Reuters) – Data storage equipment maker Brocade Communications Systems Inc. said on Tuesday that it would buy McData Corp. for $4.61 per share, or $713 million.

That’s a 48 percent premium to Monday’s $3.11 closing price of McData’s Class A shares. McData’s Class A shares rose 37 percent in pre-market trade on Inet, while Brocade fell 8.8 percent.

Brocade, whose former chief executive is accused of misleading investigators in a probe of the company’s stock options, said the deal would add to earnings by the fourth quarter of combined operations. McData stockholders would own about 30 percent of Brocade.

The main stream computer magazines are asking the same questions we have raised in this blog.

The NetApp StoreVault offering is the same beast. Sure, you can get a 1 TB unit that does snapshots for under $5K, but looking closely, you see that adding RAID and a hot spare to the baseline box leaves you with something less than 250 GB of capacity. In my opinion, and that of others, the box has limited capacity, limited auditability, limited manageability, limited support and apparently no investment protection. Is this really what SMB/SME’s want?

But as you know even enterprise sized accounts are looking at costs today. A couple of days ago a NetApp customer sent us a quote they had received from their vendor for some DS14 storage shelves with 144 GB drives. The quote was for over $29,000.00 for 2 TB of Storage! That is a mighty big markup, even for a company from SillyCon Valley! The quote was for 7 shelves and came out over $200,000.00 . The customer asked what we would charge and it turned out to be less than 50% of the price, a lot less.

Enjoy your weekend.

NetApp’s Cosmic Failures

A regular reader who recognizes that our team is very savvy about NetApp called me and asked if I knew about NetApp’s Cosmic Failures. I thought he meant Cosmic Features. But as I learned, he meant failures. He said that he had been ‘Netapped’ recently and was really tired of their sales puffery and marketing hyperbole, his terms were much more colorful. I listened to his story and asked him if he could send me a link or something that referenced this ‘Cosmic Failure’ thing . He explained to me that he could, but I could just search the Searchstorage site and find the reference.

Here is the link to the article and the paragraph that is so interesting .
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci1169744,00.html

Contacting NetApp about the problem, Campbell discovered that the company has a category of failures it refers to internally as “cosmic failures,” which are problems that it can’t, or won’t, fix. The failover detection fault the Salk Institute experienced was deemed a “cosmic failure,” and Campbell never heard from NetApp on the issue again.

Perhaps some of our readers , or some members of the toasters.mathworks.com group can provide us more detail on what these cosmic failures are and what causes them. I am certain that our readers would all appreciate the list of ‘NetApp Cosmic Failures’ and the workarounds that there are for them.

“The reason truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent” Mark Twain

You just can’t make this stuff up!

Warren Buffet speaks about abuse of Stock Options – but the whole article is worth reading
“Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance,” Buffett wrote in the most recent annual letter to shareholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway.

* Meanwhile, the University of Iowa researcher who kicked off the scandal last year by pointing to possible backdating at a handful of companies has just announced new findings: Some 29 percent of 7,774 public companies he’s examined — a total of 2,270 — are suspected of backdating.

Here is the eye opening list of companies under investigation. How many of them are in your data center? http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-optionsscore06-full.html

“Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.” Mark Twain
More Trouble for Brocade

NEW YORK, July 20 (Reuters) – Workers at technology company Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (BRCD.O: Quote, Profile, Research) altered hiring records and employed people on an ad-hoc, part-time basis in order to boost the value of stock options, the Wall Street Journal reported in its Thursday edition, citing former employees of the company.

I wonder how much of the panel’s participants discussion was about options grants and the effects on the future of the industry when the event below took place a few years ago?

June 11, 2001
Storage Leaders to Speak On the Future of Industry At Churchill Club Event
By Network Storage Forum Staff

Storage experts from EMC, Network Appliance, SNAP Appliances, Brocade, and IBM will participate in a forum called Network Storage: The New Core of the Digital Economy this Thursday at the Hyatt Rickeys in Palo Alto, California. The Churchill Club of Silicon Valley is presenting the event.

Panelists will discuss recent trends and the challenges that lay ahead for the storage industry as an increasing number of players compete for market share.

Panelists include Don Swatik, Vice President of Global Alliances, EMC; Dan Warmenhoven, CEO, Network Appliance; Jim Schraith, Chairman and CEO, Snap Appliances, Inc. (A Quantum Corporation); Greg Reyes, Chairman and CEO, Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.; and Linda Sanford, Executive and Senior Vice President, IBM Storage Systems Group. The panel moderator is Eric Pfeiffer, Features Editor, Forbes ASAP.