Zerowait Corporation

We are made wise not by recollection of the past, but by the responsibility for our future – George Bernard Shaw

When choosing an enterprise storage device many organizations make their decisions based on what their sales person says and by reading the manufacturer’s marketing brochures and paid analyst studies. However, if these same folks were looking at making a purchase from their own personal budget for a large ticket item they might do some further research. When buying a car many people research in consumer reports, when looking at houses people with children usually check out the school district and the property taxes. When making an investment in storage where can you look for unbiased reports on reliability and performance? The Internet helps in these searches, but it is very hard to find reliable sources of information that can predict the performance of a particular piece of networking or storage equipment within your organization’s IT infrastructure.

Predicting equipment longevity from looking at past performance of the company is much easier, you can ask people how their equipment is performing and what is the parts availability and service and support costs for equipment. Some companies provide excellent legacy service and support, and some companies like to force their customers to upgrade to new equipment every couple of years.

Zerowait provides affordable legacy service and support for NetApp equipment. This can lower your ROI on storage equipment substantially, there are other companies that specialize in EMC support and HDS support. Each company has a niche is specializes in. A little research can provide you with an enormous amount of storage investment wisdom.

Fighting Vendor lock in with outstanding Performance, support and reliability

Over the last week I heard many times about how much NetApp’s customers appreciate Zerowait’s service and support. They were tired of paying high prices for their service and support from NetApp and are really happy that they found our affordable alternative to NetApp for service and support. Surprisingly, I heard from one customer that a competitor to NetApp recommended us as an alternative. This customer really did not want to buy the Brand ‘E’ unit, and their salesperson told them to contact us for legacy NetApp support. It really sort of makes sense, because the Brand ‘E’ salesman fights the NetApp lock in by suggesting us, and also gains points from the customer because the customer appreciates the advice.

California trip

I have been in California visiting some customers this week and a few of our customers are looking at or testing things with VMware and filers. Keeping virtual machine copies of your desktops and servers makes a lot of sense on filers. If you have a machine problem load up another server with the VM copy. Also, it makes the testing of various versions of software on different operating systems a lot easier. Just keep VM copies of the software on your filer and download them to the desktop or server as you need them.

It might make keeping your remote users on the network a lot easier also, simply have them run a VM that has the exact settings for your VPN.

License transferability

Someone recently asked what they should write on their PO to get transferable licenses.

Something like this should work:

This Purchase order (agreement) includes the specific intent and the legal right to transfer software by purchaser to other entities. Copies of license agreements, and legal rights of transferability for all software, and protocols must accompany equipment upon equipment delivery.

Are you ever left wondering how to verify a vendor’s ROI claims?

I saw this today on the register website –
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/09/netapp_cheapo_storage/

NetApp guns for EMC and HP
Undercuts rivals
By Chris Williams
Published Tuesday 9th May 2006 10:30 GMT

CEO Dan Warmenhoven puffed: “Our new offerings position NetApp as a clear leader. We are growing three times faster than the industry average in enterprise application data centres.” ®

How would your company verify such claims? Do NetApp’s cost calculations include all of the training and software revisions to your secondary and tertiary backup and montioring sofware that will be required? I wonder if they include the training costs for your staff?

It is probably a lot more cost effective to upgrade your head or purchase a unit with transferable software licenses. Zerowait has plenty of systems available with NFS, CIFS, Cluster and ISCSI available for transfer at reasonable prices.

EMC seems to have NetApp’s customers in their sights

The new Clariion products allow users to replace disk drives, power supplies, cooling fans and small form-factor pluggable optical transceivers on their own. A new Disk Replacement Utility wizard guides them through the process, checking each step to make sure data is protected, according to EMC. In the third quarter of 2006, the company will add processes and utilities to enable qualified customers and partners to perform their own installation of the CX3 arrays. “VARs [value-added resellers] can put together services on top of the Clariion without having to call in EMC and customers that want to can install the systems themselves,” said Barry Ader, senior director of Clariion marketing at EMC.

If NetApp’s customers are looking for a low priced alternative this EMC equipment might be the ticket. I have also heard that NetApp is going to release a FAS270 with SATA disk, at a really low price point. So, we could see a price war emerge at the high end of the storage marketplace and also at the low end of the marketplace. That will be great for consumers, but it will be bad for NetApp’s resellers because they may get squeezed out of profitability, because EMC sells through Dell on the low end. Many years ago NetApp and Dell had a relationship, but when it went south, Dell and EMC got together. It should be interesting to see what happens at the low end of the market. I don’t think IBM will sell it rebranded NetApp equipment into the low end of the marketplace, so there might become a real stratification in the sales channels for NetApp equipment. Perhaps NetApp will even look at a lower price point reseller than Dell soon, and you will be able to go to Best Buy soon and buy your filers! Stranger things have happened!

NetApp releases new filer

Upgrading to the new kit should also be straightforward, according to Hargreaves. “Customers can upgrade an existing system by replacing the controller,” he said. “The upgrade does not involve changes to the data.” Hargreaves also argued that NetApp could be cheaper to use because all NetApp kit uses the same operating system and management tools.

This sounds great! I wonder if NetApp is going to release reliable, repeatable and verifiable performance tests for this unit? Jon Toigo has offered his lab to NetApp on multiple occasions to perform some independent testing. Maybe with this new system NetApp will provide the equipment to Toigo for testing.

Also of interest, from this statement it looks like NetApp is no longer selling the Spinnaker OS in addition to the NetApp 7.0 Ontap software.

SAD NEWS SGI files chapter 11

An Article worth reading in Computerworld

I have written about this issue many times before, but it seems that the Main Stream Tech Media is finally picking it up.

Most savvy enterprise storage customers understand that to get a decent ROI they need to get a usable life of at least 5 years. So, how come the big three storage vendors raise maintenance costs exponentially for systems that are more than 3 years old? A lot of our customers have read the big three’s ROI spreadsheets and calculations that show customers how if they spend hundreds of thousands now to replace their out of maintenance equipment with new, that over 3 years (the vendor desired life of the new equipment) that you’ll actually save money. Then they call Zerowait, and they see a whole new world on what ROI means.

The hardware vendors make money by forcing you to do a forklift upgrade after 3 years. Zerowait’s business model works because we help our customers extend their ROI calculations well beyond 3 years. When a customer extends their systems lifespan they also don’t need to purchase new or upgraded Backup software or monitoring software. There is no additional employee training, or implementation costs. Our customers save on maintenance costs and all of the secondary & tertiary costs also.

So how come vendors don’t include all of these additional infrastructure costs in their little spreadsheet from the marketing department? How much money would you save if you get 3rd party support (for a fraction of OEM support cost) and keep the old stuff around for another 2 years? Certainly that “enterprise class” system you bought 3 years ago is still a good system. It was enterprise class when you bought it, did it stop being enterprise class when the manufacturer’s new model came out?

Real Integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did or not – Oprah Winfrey

In the long run I think people figure out that certain companies have integrity and do the right thing over and over again. For instance, I like ordering from L.L Bean. I get what I want and satisfaction is guaranteed. My Dad used to order from them because once he got a shirt and somehow it was just not right, they took it back, and replaced it with a new one – no questions.

Working with High Availability technical equipment and storage we have to spend literally hundreds of hours documenting how we do some things so we can repeat them over and over again. This is because we need to constantly improve our processes and procedures as the technologies we work with change. Very few of our customers realize how much we do in the background to document, test and improve our procedures. But I think all of them recognize that the Zerowait staff is dedicated to providing them with the parts they need, and that the engineering support we provide will be excellent every time they call.

-- 

Character is much easier kept, than recovered. – Thomas Paine

Company reputations are gained and lost one customer at a time. Because our company deals with NetApp’s customers who have lost the faith, or can no longer afford the cost of NetApp maintenance we hear a lot of grumbling about NetApp. They come to Zerowait because they want an Affordable Alternative to NetApp that provides service, support and upgrades and can be depended on. And we work hard to build our reputation one customer at a time.

It saddens me to get a note from a NetApp customer trying to sell us his equipment that says ” …we have already purchased another SAN product, we would just like to put the NetApp behind us.”

When NetApp totally alienates a customer everyone loses. NetApp won’t get any more software revenue from the customer, the customer won’t have the great features a NetApp filer provides, and Zerowait won’t get a continuing service and support contract. It is one of the strange things about our business, the more business we do, the more OnTap software revenue NetApp gets to keep from our customers.