Zerowait Corporation

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.

Getting together

This weekend there was a fly in and chili feast at a local grass strip (MD1). A whole bunch of us flew in. As you can see there was a great variety of aircraft on the field. And although the airplanes look a lot different from each other, when you get down to the engines and instruments , we all use the same parts from the same manufacturers. Although Cessna and Piper assemble them in different ways.

So the similarity with a storage network is there, the underlying bits and pieces all come from the same vendors. Hard drives, cards and so many other parts. But each of our diagrams is a little different.

Cross referencing parts can be interesting, but next time you are negotiating with your storage vendor ask them where they get the cards I’ll bet it’ s Intel and Qlogic. And the Hard drives are likely to be from Seagate.

” We simply can’t afford NetApp pricing and have moved in a different direction”

This is what a former NetApp customer told me as they were trying to sell us their old NetApp system which they loved. And since his Purchasing Agent did not write ‘ Transferable licenses required” on their PO when they purchased their system from NetApp, they only have a residual parts value.

So many people call us up after they have turned off their filers. They complain about the price of continuing maintenance from NetApp & how NetApp’s pricing forced them to move to another system. Although they love their filers, they have gone to an inferior product that is affordable.

When we speak to them and they hear that Zerowait provides an affordable alternative to NetApp for service and support they are quite dismayed, because they did not call us sooner. Before you give up on your filers CALL ZEROWAIT 888.811.0808 . We offer affordable service and support for NetApp.

Customer comments

On Monday, we had a customer call us up because they were having a NetApp problem in their New York City Data Center. They wanted us to take care of their problem for them because they are physically located in Russia.

We sent an engineer up on the train on Tuesday morning and took care of their problem. Taking care of problems with NetApp systems is what we do, so it all seemed pretty routine to us. Imagine how happy we were to receive the following comment from the customer via email this morning.

As of yesterday afternoon EDT, NYDR is back in operation.

I would like to point out the service we received from Zerowait was prompt,
flexible, and 100% professional -- they truly met our needs the best it can
be done. The downtime was minimized as much as possible.

Providing an affordable alternative to Netapp for Service, Support and Upgrades is what Zerowait specializes in, and we really appreciate it when customers notice.

It is always interesting to see who hits the Zerowait websites and Blog.

Lately NetApp ( nat-198.95.226.224..netapp.com ) has been stopping by a lot, and so has their attorneys Bowman and Brooke. (12.162.212.128) . The folks at Hitachi stop by a lot also (px2.hitachi.co.jp ) , we also see a lot of visits from EMC (psuedo-nat -29.isus.emc.com). The most popular site that people hit us from is www.netapp.org, and second is www.drunkendata.com. Google is the most popular search engine that sends people our way.

I am always amazed at the number of hits we get from overseas. And how many people are interested in my opinions. I appreciate your visits and also your comments, and I hope that you find my perspectives worthwhile. I remember that John Wanamaker said something like his advertising was 50% effective, he just did not know which 50%. Sometimes I feel the same way.