Zerowait Corporation

It has been a very busy couple of days. We have started to get in NetApp FAS960’s and a lot of people want to upgrade from their 800 series units to the FAS960’s, and have been waiting for our stock levels to increase to satisfy these customers. Additionally, now we are geting calls from NetApp customers who are looking at new systems. Typically, a NetApp customer gets a quote from NetApp for a FAS3020 looks at the price – faints – recovers – and gives us a call – we tell them to go to www.spec.org and look at the performance of the FAS3020 or FAS3050 and compare them to the specs on the FAS960. Many are left wondering why they should buy a 3000 series unit from NetApp. We have been trying to understand the reason to upgrade from a 940 to a 3020 for many months. But, because of recent articles in the trade press end user customers are also scratching their heads.

Additionally, our customers are embracing our ZHA exception reporter. During this morning’s staff meeting I was told that yesterday my staff received two calls from customers who are using it to improve their filers performance. If you are using NetApp filers, you should try our exception reporter, it is really a useful tool.

Morphic Resonance

Last night I phoned Jon Toigo because of the search storage article and we chatted about it at length. This morning I read his blog. It seems that the press and the competition is now starting to ask the same questions that Jon, Zerowait, and our customers have been asking for a couple of years now.

When is NetApp going to provide reliable, repeatable and verifiable performance numbers? Competition in storage is strong and growing, and I predict that NetApp’s well funded competitors will soon start to push for Verification of NetApp’s claims.

It is not only Zerowait and our customers who are looking for real numbers, but also the trade press.

NetApp – we used to be a contender

It is eerie to watch the decline of NetApp. Here is company that spends hundreds a millions of dollars to purchase Spinnaker, Alacritus, Decru and yet does not spend money on listening to its customers. It is like watching GM’s decline in many ways. GM thought that by purchasing Hummer, part of Fiat, and Saab they could stop the decline of their company. But the problem is not the brands it is that the company does not listen to its customers. NetApp likens itself to a New Economy company, but it is really the same old story. Listen to your customers, they will tell you what they want and what they are willing to pay for it.

So what will happen over the next few years? Competition will force NetApp to lower its prices, I predict that because they have a very high overhead they will slowly cut into their currently very high gross margins. As their current customers smell that their salesman are getting more desperate the customers will demand higher discounts. This will cause NetApp to reduce its workforce and offload unprofitable divisions and projects. Will NetApp’s shareholders ever see a return for their investment in the Spinnaker purchase? I strongly doubt it.

It will take a couple of years, but competition will reduce NetApp to a memory, just like Wang, DEC, Compaq, and so many others.

I was in Charlotte NC yesterday visiting with a fast growing racing technology company that we provide service and support to for their NetApp filers. Even this fast growing, fast paced business needs help in controlling their NetApp costs for service support and expansion.

They love their NetApp equipment, but they get heartburn when they look at the prices NetApp wants to charge. So they called us, and they are very happy with our affordable alternative to NetApp.

This week we sent out an announcement on our ZHA Exception reporter which is a tool for helping customers to manage and optimize their NetApp infrastructures. It is subscription based, and reads through the autosupport logs that our customers filers send us automatically. You can see a sample at www.zpiphany.com .

If you are looking to optimize your NetApp filers performance I would suggest that you take a look at our product. If you want a sample please send an email with your autosupport as a .TXT attachment to store@zerowait.com and we will prepare a sample for you.

Disaster prevention Summit – May 31 and June 1

Jon Toigo’s group is putting on a Summit that should be very useful to the end users in the industry that read this blog. I am working on putting together a hospitality suite at the Venue for all of the folks that we work with in the area and also some of the attendees of the conference.

I will be visiting with our clients in Tampa, Orlando and Miami next week, and I hope that they will join us for Jon’s conference. Additionally, next week, I will visiting with our international dealers and partners at the ASCDI conference in Miami.

Why buy a new NetApp unit? Does Jabil Circuit build a better box for NetApp than NEC did?

We get calls on a daily basis from customers who are looking at an outrageous price quote from NetApp for some new upgrade. Although the NetApp sales folks tell them that the new FAS3020 series equipment is faster and better than the F880 or a FAS960 they can’t seem to provide any reliable performance statistics to prove that they are. So, if the new stuff is no better then the equipment that you already have why not just upgrade your storage and max out your current systems? Once the NetApp sales person hears that a customer is considering the purchased of an off lease transferable licensed system, all sorts of proclamations of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt are unleashed. What is odd about these proclamations is that according to the marketing materials that go with the older systems they were the best things ever made. Has technology changed so drastically in one model from the last? I just don’t get it. The only difference I can see is that the FAS3020 equipment is assembled by Jabil Circuit from parts supplied by Intel, Qlogic & Cherokee power supplies, while the 800 series and the 900 seires were assembled by NEC from components made by Intel, Qlogic and Cherokee power supplies.

The drives are from Seagate and the shelves are made by Xyratex. So the big difference in the new NetApp units is who assembles them? Sounds far fetched to me. As months turn to years NetApp still won’t provide any verifiable performance claims to an independent lab, although they promised they would.

EXPECT DOUBLE DISK FAILURES WITH ATA DRIVES – Dave Hitz – NetApp Founder

After reading Daves’ blog you have to wonder if NetApp keeps any of their critical accounting data or sales data on ATA drives. Dave goes on to say – Bottom line, using ATA drives without double protecting RAID is questionable. As drives grow, I suspect that it will become a requirement even for Fibre Channel drives.

Perhaps Dave is suggesting that the best protection against a poor implementation by the manufacturer of the storage subsystems and drives is to waste storage space. I guess that makes sense for the storage companies, because to protect yourself you need to waste storage space which means they sell more storage. But according to their sales and marketing campaigns their systems are extremely reliable. So why is Dave Hitz suggesting that customers buy more protection against disk failure?

Either their complete systems are reliable out of the box or they are not. Don’t worry though, Zerowait knows how to make NetApp systems reliable. Zerowait provides affordable alternatives to NetApp for Service, Support and Upgrades.

Reliable, Repeatable and Verifiable

“You don’t understand how we calculate price/performance,” NetApp says.

Over the last few months it has become quite apparent that the performance numbers provided by NetApp are not in any way verifiable. Jon Toigo’s request for verification of their performance claims have gone unanswered by NetApp and the slow trickle of comments we used to receive from NetApp users asking for reliable performance figures has become a daily request for some sort of performance verification criteria. I think Jon Toigo’s test lab is the best place to get this information generated, since his company has the facilities to produce the data.

In past discussions with Jon, I have stressed that the information that he produces should be able to be reproduced by any user in their own lab set up. NetApp has fudged the test criteria in their SPEC.ORG tests by changing all sorts of parameters to make their numbers match their claims. Customers have noticed and I am surprised that EMC and Hitachi have not started to point out the inconsistencies in NetApp’s claims. Perhaps it is the nature of the beast. But our clients need reliable performance numbers to make their enterprise storage decisions. If their vendors won’t supply reliable performance numbers who can they trust?

Data Migrations

Earlier this week, one of my engineers and I went to see a customer in Virginia that is getting ready to migrate their NetApp data to new data center. They wanted to know what our recommendations were and how long we expected it to take. Since they have Snap mirror licenses already the procedure will be pretty simple and the time will be determined by how fast their systems can transmit and write the data. Using snap mirror to migrate data is a great tool, and really can save you a bundle of time and money.

After our morning visit to Virginia, we stopped in to see a Government customer in DC. They are also about to migrate their data to a new platform and wanted our advice. We have been working with this group for several years and we discussed how we were going to migrate their volumes and data, as well as the lack of verifiable performance numbers from NetApp, these are some pretty sharp guys and they have learned over time not to trust the marketing numbers their NetApp sales folks provide.

The lack of any verifiable, reliable and repeatable performance numbers is real problem when customers are trying to select an enterprise storage platform. Sooner or later customers are going to notice that the manufacturer’s marketing numbers are often quite arbitrary.