Zerowait Corporation

Our Backups are Failing – Shoot the Messenger
– hardware and software vendor response – CYA

On Thursday afternoon I received an email requesting my presence on a conference call from a company with a back up issue. I had not heard of the company before, and I went to our engineering folks and asked if they had spoken to them. They were in the dark as much as I was. At 6:00 PM I called into the conference call and announced who I was and then just started listening. After a few minutes an engineer started reviewing his back up problem. He apologized for his accent and he outlined his infrastructure which includes a Brocade switch, NetApp R200, Veritas back up and some Linux boxes. After a few minutes the NetApp SE called in and introduced himself. And the engineer asked him some questions. It seems that Symantec and NetApp will not provide a clear certain answer as to whether his solution will work. The NetApp Engineer kept asking for the case number and the ticket number, but would make no promises as to whether he could solve their problem. His suggestion was that the customer purchase snapdrive to simplify their SAN – because no one understands SANS. The Symantec guy said that he did not have the authority to certify the solution and the engineer was saying that after 8 months he still did not have a working backup solution and their deadline was two weeks away. They wanted an engineer from NetApp on site next week to solve their problems.

The Symantec guy and the NetApp guy went quiet. So I figured it was my turn to speak. I mentioned that there was a lot of corporate CYA going on in this conference call and the issue had to be among the switch packet size, R200 drive incompatibilities, or firmware problems with their backup software. The NetApp SE wanted to know who I was. So I told them I was with Zerowait – the largest independent third party NetApp support organization. A lot of folks started asking questions and wanted to know how I got invited to the conference call so I told them which attendee I got the email from.

Boy things got interesting then, they very impolitely told me to get off their conference call. I guess Shoot the messenger was their solution. It is a pity too. I am pretty certain we could solve their problem. It sounded like a problem we ran into which was eerily similar recently, and buying more NetApp software is not going to solve the problem.

Recently, I was visiting a NetApp customer with over 50 F760’s which they would like us to support. As NetApp cancels their support options for their customers with the F760 model of equipment we are expanding our service and support programs for these customers. The F760 is probably the most reliable equipment that NetApp ever made. And with proper maintenance it will last for many years more.

Please keep Zerowait in mind if you are looking for affordable service and supprot for your NetApp 700 seriesa and 800 series filers.

NetApp finally Publishes Verifiable results!
Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with anything technical or related to their Filers

Of course their test data is still held hostage and unverifiable.

My trip to Dallas

During my trip to Dallas I visited with a few customers and business associates. Ken Barth at Tek Tools suggested that I take my customers to dinner at Del Friscos for dinner, Wow! The food was fantastic, and the conversation lasted about three hours about data back ups, Zerowait service and support, parents, children, and Sarbanes Oxley – including the political comedy of our elected officials in Washington DC.

Tuesday morning Ken Barth took me to Breakfast at the Mecca on Harry Hines. We chatted for about an hour about our companies and our growth strategies. Ken is one of the smartest guys I know, and we have many common customers.

My meetings went very well in Dallas and it looks like we will be picking up quite a number of NetApp 700 series filers for our affordable hardware support services.

Controversy, crap and confusion – Alan Simpson

I was listening to an interview with Alan Simpson this weekend , and this was his quote about the Washington scene. What struck me is how similar it is to the bunk that we hear on a regular basis in the storage industry. The storage press for the most part, just rehashes corporate press releases, and this causes nothing but distrust within the end user base. Jon Toigo, seems to much or the trade press as a controversial guy, but he is the only member of the industry press that I know who actually seems to dig down and check out what the corporate spin marketers say.

I have to go to Dallas this week to talk to a client that has dug down, and read some of Jon’s articles on the lack of verifiable performance figures within the industry. The client asked me to visit their offices and put on an executive presentation for them to about our legacy service and support services, and in particular to compare the performance of the NetApp F700 series and the NetApp F800 series filers. This client has FAS3000 series filers and legacy filers and has seen that our whitepaper correlates with their findings. Jon Toigo has been waiting for about 6 months for NetApp to provide him the basis for their performance figures, and many customers are watching this story, and noticing that NetApp is not forthcoming with their performance figures.

During the snow storm I had to use my 1948 Willy’s to go down my driveway. My Willy’s worked perfectly and it reminded me that appropriate technology never goes out of style. The same is true for your legacy NetApp filers. NetApp and Willy’s don’t make replacement parts for their older models, but replacement parts are available from specialty vendors. Zerowait specializes in providing parts, service and support for NetApp’s legacy filers. If you are satisfied with your older equipment and it satisfies your needs, why upgrade?

I flew Southwest Airlines to Tampa this week on Sunday. As you may know Southwest is a big NetApp customer. And on Sunday they were having trouble getting planes in and out of the Mid Atlantic States. As I was flying from BWI, the flight I was on was in the middle of their weather related scheduling problems.

Through the afternoon I checked their flight status online and their website kept saying the flight was going to depart about 17 minutes late. When I got through the TSA screening I checked again and the status was still delayed 17 minutes. Our proposed departure time came and went and there was no change on line about the departure time of the flight. Eventually, an anouncement was made that the aircraft had not left Manchester, NH yet and once it did- it would be about 45 minutes until it was at the Gate at BWI. The flight departed about 90 minutes late, and got us into Tampa about 11:30 at night.

Southwest Airlines uses NetApp filers, and through the snow storm they worked fine! I don’t think their usage had much of an affect on the flight schedules, but maybe some NetApp marketing person could spin it and put out a press release about how NetApp saved the day for Southwest.

Tampa Clearwater & home
I have been in Florida the last couple of days attending a conference and then visiting customers and also I had lunch with the Jon Toigo and his staff. It has been a rewarding couple of days. During the conference I was able to have lunch with Jeff Klein and we chatted at length about the end user bill of rights. Jeff feels that customers need to be more aggressive in asking for their transferable licenses. He has some really good ideas and I will put up a link soon

The future of storage requires a lot of parts from the past, without them your data could be lost.

Everyone likes to talk about what the future of storage is going to be like, but very few of the reporters and pundits ever talk about the reality that the future requires warehousing a substantial amount of parts from the past for service, support and parts replacement.

Sometimes interesting things happen when big storage companies don’t take into account the parts availability issues. An interesting aspect of this is the expected end of life of the 5400 RPM drives that NetApp uses in their R200’s. The drive manufacturer is going to replace the drive with a 7200 RPM drive. Our understanding is that NetApp’s Ontap OS uses the RPM of drives to determine drive compatibility within their raid groups on the R200 . This could cause a problem for NetApp’s customers who are replacing drives with faster drives. Unrecognized drives can cause a raid failure.

Is NetApp working on a workaround or an update for Ontap to handle this problem? Is NetApp informing their customers of the potential availability problem? Would you want your most important data on a system with a potential problem like this? The drive manufacturer must have told NetApp about their plans to supersede their 5400 RPM drives long ago, when will NetApp tell its customers? When will they release a bug fix?

Zerowait provides an affordable alternative for parts, service and support of NetApp filers.

$$ By the way, give us a call if you have some NetApp F840’s you are looking to trade in! $$

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up – Rex Stout

NetApp is at it again, I wonder where we can find the verification to this 50% savings they are talking about?

Krish Padmanabhan, general manager of NetApp’s heterogeneous data-protection business unit, said the VTL600 and VTL1200 come with self-tuning to balance workloads and tape smart sizing features for a 50 percent savings in physical tape versus other VTLs.

Averages don’t always reveal the most telling realities. You know, Shaquille O’Neal and I have an average height of 6 feet. – U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich ( He is 4′ 10″ tall? whereas US basketball star Shaquille O’Neal is 7’1” tall! )

$$ By the way, give us a call if you have some NetApp F840’s you are looking to trade in! $$