Zerowait Corporation

“A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.” Fred Allen

Often we find articles in the trade press that seem to be simple rewrites of the press releases that are put out by the PR flunkies. It is not only Oprah that does not feel a need to check the validity of facts . “You are gullible. So am I. We believe that when something is written down and presented as truth, it is actually true. This is the contract between a writer and reader. It is based on trust.”

The articles I have read about NetApp doubling their Performance numbers with every release of hardware are extremely hard to prove, but they are published repeatedly by the trade press, as noted by Toigo. If this misrepresentation of the facts was the only time it happened it would be understandable , but it is a pattern. I guess what Fred Allen said is still true today.

Today’s word of advice goes back to Ronald Reagan “Trust but Verify”, when it comes to Storage Vendor performance statistics, and test before your purchase.

“All vendor demos are boring. It’s the law, I think “ Scott Adams

That certainly is the truth, some of the powerpoint presentations I have listened too were worse then getting my wisdom teeth out. Why is it that sales and marketing folks take so long to tell you about their Gartner magic quadrant reports and their value propositions?

Why can’t they just provide easily verifiable features, benefits, costs and life cycle figures for their equipment, software or support?

At Zerowait we know that you are busy, so here is our marketing pitch:
At Zerowait we provide affordable service, support and upgrades for NetApp equipment. We provide our customers with hardware support contracts varying in length between 1 and 3 years. Our hardware support costs are typically between 50% and 60% of the OEM’s cost for support.

Here is our sales pitch:
We are recognized as the leader in third party service and support, if you send us your filer’s weekly logs we can provide you a service and support quote for your NetApp equipment. Additionally, we can provide you with a sample of our Exception Reporter service which will may help you increase the performance and storage utilization.

That was easy!

Let’s clear up some misconceptions about NetApp storage. You may have heard that there is no such thing as transferable licenses, third party support or reliable SRM tools for NetApp’s products. But that is not true.

Transferable licenses – NetApp licenses customers to use their software products and protocols. Their protocols are transferable if the customer writes ‘Transferable licensing required’ on their PO and the PO is accepted by NetApp. This week we transfered the license on an 800 series unit that was shipped to California and is set up and running. There was no trouble getting the license transfer documents from NetApp. If you would like some help in securing your transferable license from NetApp when you purchase a new unit from them, just give us a call. We will fax you a copy of a letter of transfer from NetApp so you can reference it with your purchase order.

Third Party Service and Support – Zerowait specializes in providing NetApp hardware service and support to end users who are looking for an affordable alternative to the high prices for support that NetApp charges. Zerowait currently supports hundreds of filers in the field and has several hundred NetApp parts customers who perform their own self maintenance. Zerowait provides reliable service for NetApp filers and we can provide reference accounts if you need them.

The Future – Zerowait is expanding to meet the demands of our new customers. In response to these new customers we are building our parts depots currently, and also introducing our Exception Reporter in a couple of weeks. Zerowait will remain focused on providing our customers long term affordable service and support for their High Availability infrastructures.

When did SATA become full duplex?

I am often asked to comment on the performance of SATA drives as compared to FC in NetApp gear. Although I can’t seem to find any reliable perfromance figures comparing the two in a filer application I can’t see how a SATA drive can perform as well as a FC drive since the FC drive is Full Duplex and the SATA drive is not.

Jon Toigo has a comment on all of this which I found simple & easy to understand:

January 25th, 2006

He also pointed me to this article:“A first glance of paper specifications may make SATA look similar in performance to SAS but do not be fooled by first impressions as when it comes to enterprise class server performance SAS drives will considerably outperform any SATA drives due to the fact that the interface is Full Duplex rather than Half Duplex (as is the case for SATA), the SAS drives have lower latency, lower command overheads, faster access times, deeper command queue depths and also offer the possibility of configuring dual-ported solutions which enables a further doubling of data rates.”

“Even if the SAS drives are only used in single-ported mode the Full Duplex nature of SAS could bring about a doubling in performance from the interface alone. The important thing is to measure transactions rather than data rates as it is transactions per second performance that normally matters in most server applications. If data streaming only is required then SATA interfaced drives may prove adequate and the user may as well choose the lowest cost per GB in these instances provided they have a secure backup of their data”

I wrote this note to Jon Toigo in reference to NetApp performance :

Hi Jon:

We constantly get asked about the relative performance of FC to SATA drives, because NetApp is pushing the SATA option to provide a lower cost solution to their customers on the FAS3000 series. Our customers would like to see valid, verifiable and repeatable data on the performance between a NetApp Filer with FC drives and one with SATA drives. In the NetApp case, I wonder if the NVRAM card takes up the slack caused by the half duplex SATA drives? Maybe it doesn’t matter on a lightly loaded filer, with few users. However, the FAS3000 is marketed & sold as a high performance unit, not as a disk to disk back up device.

Mike

You have to think anyway, so why not think big? – Donald Trump


Over the last few years Zerowait has built up quite a reputation as the best provider of NetApp third party support. Large companies like HP, EDS, CSC, and others depend on us for service and support of their NetApp hardware, and many other companies and government departments do also. Recently there has been an increase in interest in our services from companies with 20 to 100 filers which they manage themselves. The savings to these organizations can be enormous, and with our value added services like our exception reporter we can provide better service and support than the OEM. So these companies can realize monetary savings and get increased performance from their filers with service and support form Zerowait.

So we are taking this piece of the Donald’s advice – we are starting to think big, this means targeting the larger NetApp accounts in our case. If your company is spending too much on NetApp hardware support, give us a call. You will be glad you did!

Monopoly…is a great enemy to good management.
Adam Smith – the Wealth of Nations

Prospective customers ask us how can we provide better engineering, service, and support than NetApp does since they are the OEM. It is not easy, as we must compete with the manufacturer of the equipment we have to do a better job and provide superior service and support at a competitive price point. And since the majority of our prospects turn into customers we must do a great job. If you would like a reference from one of our service customers on the hundreds of filers we support just give us a call.

Currently, many NetApp customers are complaining about NetApp being unable to provide them with equipment on time. As the only supplier for their product they have no reason to improve their service except to fight EMC. But if a customer is ‘locked in’ to NetApp than NetApp has no reason to improve service, because the cost of changing your storage vendor is so high. NetApp’s sales force knows this. Therefore only in a competitive situation with another storage vendor will a NetApp Storage customer have more negotiation leverage.

To get the best price from NetApp, you should negotiate at the end of their quarter, when their sales force has to make their numbers. Also it can only help in your negotiation to introduce a competitive product into your negotiation with NetApp’s sales folks. Asking Zerowait for reference quotes for upgrades can also help you when you are negotiating with NetApp’s sales force.

NetApp supply chain woes frustrate users

Every growing company has problems, I hope that NetApp get’s their problems under control. If they don’t I am certain that EMC and HDS will be certain to capitalize on NetApp’s problems. The more NetApp sells the bigger our business becomes, so I certainly want them to fix their delivery and supply problems quickly.

Toigo has an another interesting post That is worth reading.

The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which the business renders. Leo Burnett

Based on this quote I thought it would be a good idea to list what Zerowait does for our customers.

Zerowait provides an affordable alternative to NetApp for service, support and upgrades to NetApp customers who love their NetApp equipment, but can’t afford the annual service costs from NetApp.

Zerowait provides transferable licensed filers to NetApp customers who are looking for licensed filers without having to pay NetApp’s high prices.

Zerowait provides parts for NetApp users who are looking for a reliable vendor for their NetApp needs.

Zerowait supports NetApp filers for customers and helps our customers tune their filers to provide optimum performance for their particular needs.

Zerowait ships NetApp equipment around the world in support of service organizations managing NetApp filers for their customers.

Zerowait provides 24/7/365 on call services for our service and support customers.

I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success. Jack Welch Recognizing opportunities when they arise is relatively easy, creating and executing profitably on the opportunity is much more difficult. But the willingness to adjust your product and service offering to the requirements of your customer is often the best way to gain access to new customer opportunities. I asked a stock analyst this week why public companies often focus on market share rather than per unit profitability. The analyst said that the reason is that there is a disconnect between the shareholder’s value perception and the employee managers of the company.

It seems logical to me as the President of Zerowait that the best way for us to succeed is to satisfy our customers as completely as we can and therefore provide more value to our NetApp customers for their NetApp service and support dollar than NetApp does itself. Outstanding service and support for NetApp products is a tiny market niche, but we are focused on it. NetApp itself is focused on new product sales instead of service and support of installed product. Zerowait provides an affordable alternative to NetApp for service, support and upgrades of NetApp equipment. Hundreds of NetApp customers buy parts and service from us every year, and we expect to add to our customer base significantly again this year, because we are focused on customer support and the manufacturer is not.

Ask the Engineer

We get asked this question a lot in relation to NetApp Filers

DUMPING TO MULTIPLE TAPES IN AN AUTOLOADER

Question: Is there a way to get NetApp’s standard dump command to automatically sequence through tapes in an autoloader? Or do I still have to manually break things up per tape?

Answer: Find out if your autoloader or tape library supports “Stacker Mode” or “Sequential Mode”. Spectra Logic 2K TreeFrogs, for instance, support the former. Your manual can explain how to set it.

The autoloader in Stacker or Sequential Mode is dumb, only knowing that if a tape is ejected then it should remove the tape and replace it with the next one in line.

Once the Library is in Stacker or Sequential Mode, then you just need to specify, in the DUMP command, the drive name for each required tape.

EXAMPLE 1: To dump a volume named “test” to tape you could use:

dump 0f urst1h /vol/test

urst1h is the device name on a sample tape library and passes the commands for unload rewind. Run sysconfig -t to determine the equivalent for your own autoloader tape library.

EXAMPLE 2: Now lets say your volume is 150GB and your tapes hold 50GB each uncompressed. You would need 3 tapes. The command to span the three tapes using DUMP would be:

dump 0f urst1h,urst1h,urst1h /vol/test

In the above example, the number of tapes is indicated in the command line. If the filer does not complete the dump in the specified number of tapes and needs more, then it will drop you out to the filer prompt with a device open error. This indicates that the tape library is not ready, but that the filer wants to continue the dump.

To continue, you simply need to make sure another tape is available in the library, and then type yes [ENTER] to retry. The dump will continue with the next tape.

Zerowait is working on developing our European distribution and support center. Of course the first step is always to get the shirts and coffee mugs in place!

Over the next few months we should have this service depot completely ready to go.

News from the Blade. org initiative just came into my mailbox. If you want to keep abreast of changes in this niche market you may want to visit their site www.blade.org