Zerowait Corporation

The Future of Storage:

This week’s economist has a fascinating article on the future of Disk Storage. If the article is correct enterprise companies who are considering their strategic storage initiatives should look at a 4 -5 year life for their hard disk storage. What all of this means for the future of Companies like EMC and NetApp I can’t foresee, but perhaps they should start concentrating on Storage management instead of striping disks.

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5571544

A radically different approach to storing data is the Ovonic Unified Memory (OUM), pioneered by Stan Ovshinsky, a highly successful and eclectic serial inventor. OUM is based on so-called chalcogenide materials, the atomic structure of which can be changed reversibly from a well ordered crystalline state to a disordered, amorphous state by applying a burst of electrical current. These two states can then be used to represent zeroes and ones. The technology is faster than flash, has a lifetime of trillions of cycles, and its performance increases as the size of the memory cells is reduced (since less energy is required to change the state of a smaller cell). Mr Ovshinsky’s firm, Ovonyx, has already made prototype chips in conjunction with STMicroelectronics, a big chipmaking firm, and the results are said to be very promising.

OUM is just one of the candidates in the race to create a “universal” memory, the holy grail of the storage industry, which would combine the speed of RAM with the non-volatility of flash and the low cost and high storage-density of hard disks. Ed Doller, chief technology officer at Intel’s flash-memory division, says the company is following the progress of OUM technology closely. Although it is not in a position to threaten flash in the next couple of years, he says, “beyond 2010, it has legs”.

Is remote hosted storage ready for your tier one storage requirements?

Amazon seems to think so.
“This is intended to be very flexible to support any application a developer might build,” says Adam Selipsky, Amazon’s vice president of product management, adding that there is no limit to the amount of storage to which users can gain access.”

A few years ago when everyone’s darling was Storagenetworks. The Media thought that it was a great idea, customers were more hesitant. We ended up getting a lot of their NetApp equipment for our parts business, most of it was never even turned on. I always wondered why a Fortune 500 company would rely on a company like Storagenetworks to hold their most valuable databases. And it seems like a lot of other people were worried also, becasue they had very few customers for their service.

The problem is a matter of trust, who can you trust with your Data and its security and access? Would you trust Amazon more than Google with your customer data? Who has access to that data? What is your database worth to you, is it only a storage cost? Most companies view their corporate data as an asset, not only as a cost. I think that will remain an issue for the valuations of remote data storage services.

Website hits

It is really amazing where our hits come from on our Websites www.zerowait.com and www.thezerowaitstore.com . About 50% of our hits come from the USA and usually between 5% and 10% are from the San Francisco bay area, and about 15 % are from the area between Boston and Richmond. We always get a few hits from Ohio and Illinois, and then we get hits in and around Atlanta and Florida. Three cities in Texas always show up, Houston, Dallas and Austin.

The hits from Europe and Asia are fascinating. Every day we get hits from Beijing and Bangalore, we get hits from London, Paris, Rome, and Cairo. Helsinki and Moscow show up occasionally as do Damascus and Athens.

Currently we do about 10%- 15 % of our business with Asia and Europe, but the majority of our business is still located in the NFL cities of the USA. Over the years, we have noticed that the NFL teams seem to pick locations which have a lot of NetApp storage. Which is good because these cities usually have very good airports from which we can travel to and from when visiting our customers for sales or technical service calls.

Over the next few weeks we will be traveling to these cities quite a bit to help our customers with data migrations. Some are moving up from F840’s to FAS940’s some of which we sold them with transferable licenses, others are moving data centers and need our help to help with the migrations. March Madness in the NetApp storage business has arrived.

How many technology companies have been able to manage four big projects at once successfully?

Currently it looks like NetApp is trying to manage two operating systems, a sales distribution relationship with IBM, the integration of the Decru security business with its core storage business, and storage virtualization. It might be that they can run two or three but I see serious trouble ahead for NetApp.

In the operating systems they have been telling us for years that they were going to be able to integrate their Ontap and the Spinnaker stuff, but that seems to have been a dream as can be seen by NetApp’s Steve Gomo’s statements.
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Semiconductor and Systems Conference in Dana Point, California, this week, NetApp CFO Steve Gomo promised that it will be a long time before GX, which is aimed at data intensive applications such as seismic research, converges with 7G. “It could take years,” he said, adding that, over time, the two products will eventually share more and more features.

The Distribution agreement with IBM is running into trouble at the street level where savvy customers are playing the sales reps against each other, and the sales reps are selling what they can get the highest commissions on.
How is the IBM/NetApp deal working out? I hear it’s going nowhere. — B.P., San Jose.

The integration of Decru is taking NetApp’s best Sales Engineers and Sales reps as they move to a higher margin product, as is illustrated clearly b the migration of sales reps and SE’s in NetApp’s DC office for Decru

And finally there is the whole concept of integrating virtualization of name space into NetApp’s products, which Hu Yoshida of HDS seems to think is going to be impossible with a PC based architecture.

NetApp should pick one or two initiatives to work on and do it well.

At Zerowait we specialize in providing an affordable alternative to NetApp’s high priced Service, Support, Parts and Upgrades.

How is the NetApp & IBM deal working out?

According to Steve Duplessie – Everything is going to be just fine.

But looking at the wonderful relationship that NetApp had with Dell’s rebranding of the F700 series and the lovefest that ensued after the Gfilers that came from NETAPP & HDS combined efforts, I would say that NetApp is not one to play well with others. I am certain IBM knows this history.

It might be a great opportunity to get better prices on your NetApp hardware purchases though. Now you have two places to go to get exactly the same parts, perfromance and service contracts. And since NetApp’s sales folks get a commission they might be very willing to let IBM’s sales folks do their missionary sales work and then come in and take the ensuing deals. This has been the practice with NetApp’s sales force and their channel – Let the local channel develop the account and then make it a house account for NetApp’s direct sales force. It makes for a better margin.

In the past few weeks, Zerowait has gotten calls from sales reps asking what we would pay them for older NETAPP equipment they would like to replace in their accounts, so it seems that some brand replacement is happening. But maybe it does not matter to NetApp, since if IBM replaces older NetApp Models with rebranded models, NetApp is still selling more boxes.

It might be that IBM’s management is taking a strategic approach, and they are learning all they can from NetApp. Once they have learned the marketplace they can set up a team in Bangalore to make a better Filer Head than NetApp does. Perhaps they can start with something like a FreeBSD kernel, buy cards from Qlogic & INTEL and ask NEC to make their head units.

Going to Boston

Next week I have to travel to Boston to meet with several customers about their NetApp hardware support. I always like going to Boston, because our customers in the area are all so close together that I can get to see everyone by using their subways. Several of our Boston and Cambridge customers know each other and we have gotten together at the Cambridge brewery a number of times. It looks like we might be doing that again on Tuesday night of next week. If you would like to join us just drop us an email.

Can NetApp and Kazeon Verify their claims?

“Our collaboration with NetApp offers the ultimate solution for enterprises looking to gain complete visibility and instant recovery of online backup data,” said Michael Marchi, VP of Solution Marketing at Kazeon. “By quickly delivering this deep integration and bringing SnapSearch and Recovery software to market, we’re demonstrating that our partnership with NetApp is bringing immediate value and measurable benefits to our customers.”

“NetApp is focused on bringing customers solutions that reduce the complexity and cost of comprehensive enterprise data protection,” said Patrick Rogers, VP of Products and Partners at Network Appliance. “Today we are providing customers with improved visibility and rapid data recovery.”

Perhaps Patrick Rogers and Michael Marchi can provide the analysts and user community with a way to test these claims? I understand that Jon Toigo’s test lab can do comprehensive performance and validation tests. What are the measurable benefits, and how does their new solution reduce complexity?

More Bad Press for NetApp

“It was a dead product once NetApp got hold of it, and we knew that,” he said. But he was unprepared for NetApp’s lack of support for the product, which was still under maintenance and the company’s disregard for the problems he encountered using the technology.

Many customers come to Zerowait for affordable service and support for their unsupported NetApp Filers . We are supporting more and more filers every week. Give us a call if you love your NetApp Filer but are a little dismayed by their service & support pricing.

Thanks to you our Business continues to grow.

We moved into our building on Haines Street in Newark, DE 8 years ago and it looks like we are outgrowing the building now. As we need more office space and warehouse space. We have been looking around town for another building recently, but finding a building that has the combination of power requirements, connectivity, loading docks and convenience to the downtown area is proving difficult. As Newark is a University town there is the added problem that there is always a shortage of office space and parking.

The upside of being in Newark is that it is a vibrant place with lots of places for food and a beer. And of course being from the area, we know a lot of folks in town. And that is nice.

Over the weekend we had to work some overtime to meet the shipping requirements of one of the midwestern states IT departments. They required a F840 and some storage shelves for a major storage upgrade. We will be shipping the equipment out today. Many state agencies have figured out that purchasing transferable licensed NetApp equipment is a great way to get high performance while saving the taxpayer’s money.

Currently, Zerowait has F840, FAS940, F880 and many other transferable licensed filers in stock and ready to be configured for your requirements.