Zerowait Corporation

Strategic and tactical thinking about your storage infrastructure.

When you consider your enterprise storage strategic plan do you consider a ROI of three years, or five years? What does your vendor consider the term of their strategic alliance to be? What happens to your service and support budget and QOS if your chosen vendors’ agreement falls apart with their suddenly not so strategic partner? What happens if a vendor cancels support after 18 months for the product you just purchased?

Many enterprise storage companies face this problem, and when the vendors say that the only choice is to upgrade and spend even more money, and get an even more proprietary solution, customers often agree to the upgrade because they see no other solution. But there are other viable solutions, and avoiding vendor lock in is an enterprise customer’s best defense.

I was at a conference recently in Tampa, and I was speaking to some managers of big data centers, every one of them was interested in how to avoid vendor lock in. Each of them had a nightmare story about their storage vendor and hidden lock in costs. We had a great discussion about the different tactics there are to fight vendor lock in. Fighting vendor lock in starts at the negotiations stage, but it is very important that you add addendum’s to the vendor’s RTU (Right To Use) license agreement and also make certain your PO reflects the special changes you want starting with the right to a transferable license and the right to use third party support without any changes to your warranty. Tactically you can save tens of thousands of dollars at purchase, but strategically you can save hundreds of thousands by negotiating aggressively with your storage manufacturer.

NetApp & IBM agreements

We get a lot of calls from customers who are trying to figure out how to get the best deal on NetApp equipment and we advise them to shop around. The agreement between NetApp and IBM provides a way to negotiate a better deal on your new NetApp equipment’s because now you have two competing manufacturer sales forces offering identical equipment. Since both sales forces have to meet their quotas a savvy customer can play them against each other.
Additionally each company has a reseller channel which can also be contacted to get quotes from.

Since both NetApp and IBM are offering NetApp software and support services, there is no differentiation in product or service other than price. It is very similar to going between different car dealers and negotiating.

I recommend some caution in purchasing the IBM branded equipment because NetApp in the past had a similar OEM agreement with Dell. But when it fell apart the Dell customers were left without support. As the article shows IBM just discontinued its last NAS head, how long will it be before they discontinue support for the NetApp brand?

During last week’s Disaster recovery Summit in Tampa I was surprised to see so few storage vendors and storage resellers. I would have expected to see a whole bunch of Storage resellers at the conference, since recovering data is such an important part of Business Continuity. It seemed very odd, although the attendees were probably very happy not to see them. Zerowait was the only storage support and services company in attendence, and I was the only non- manufacturer on the panel discussions.

In a strange coincidence today in a press release by Tech Data anouncing their NetApp distribution agreement they say: “Whether it’s ensuring critical data is accessible in case of disaster or complying with regulations that mandate increased digital document retention, businesses of all sizes are turning to IT resellers to develop innovative, cost-effective storage solutions,” said Pete Peterson, Tech Data’s vice president, Systems Product Marketing.

Tech data is in Clearwater and the conference was in Tampa, at the Airport Marriott. If Data Availalbility in the face of a disaster is so important to Tech Data and NetApp, I wonder why they did not drive over the bridge to the conference? It would have been a great opportunity for them to introduce their new product.

The 2006 Disaster recovery Summit is history now and it was the best conference I have ever attended. And here is why:
1) Attendees were really interested in the topics.
2) End user experiences were clear,enlightening and well presented.
3) Vendors were not allowed to give their standard powerpoint commercials.
4) When Vendors made unverifiable claims, Toigo questioned them on their statements.
5) After conference dinner party was outstanding .

And for Zerowait, we found a lot more customers who are interested in our service and support offerings.

I wish other conferences were as well run, focused and informative.

Disaster recovery or disaster prevention?

This week there is a conference in Tampa about preventing a catastrophic loss of data. Although the conference’s focus is based on FEMA types of events, every enterprise needs to be aware of the costs of lost data.

Companies in this market niche break down the possibility of disaster and the recovery of data into as many facets as there are in a prism. The daily concerns of data deliverability to your customer or clients desktops and the security of the data so data does not end up on your competitors desktop breaks down into a few specific areas.

Network security and vulnerability – Can your users access data easily while preventing unauthorized viewers from seeing your data?

Data tape storage vulnerability- Is your off site tape vault secure or are there vulnerabilities to tape loss and theft in the process.

End of Life of Disk and subsystems – How does your company dispose of disks at the end of life or end of lease of your storage subsystems? Some of our customers keep all of their disks at the end of lease but this is very costly, but many are uncertain as to how to clean disks before returning them or disposing them.

At Zerowait we are recognized for providing High Availability networking services & storage services to our customers, so many of our customers have adopted our thoughts on disaster prevention instead of disaster recovery. Using a combination load balancing switches, VPN’s and data mirroring we keep our data in two separate locations, and many of our customers do the same thing now. It really does not cost any more than implementing a D/R site and strategy, and the advantages during data migrations and network changes are numerous. But a Secure VPN between multiple locations introduces a whole new set of issues about virtual site location security.

Some of our customers have been the targets of the tape loss scandals that have recently been covered in the media and it should come as no surprise that these losses occur, in a competitive environment the low cost provider will win some business, but to lower their costs they must forgo some security. You get what you pay for. Implementing a Disaster prevention site strategy could have prevented these data loss stories from hitting the media.

Recently many customers been asking us to help them clean their disks. When using a subsystem like NetApp there are a whole bunch of challenges to doing this. And this has become a growing part of our business. But at the lowest common denominator you want to be certain that there is no visible proprietary data on your disks when you are done with them.

I hope to cover some of this during my time on the panel discussion at the conference, and I hope to see you there.