Zerowait Corporation

Alliances

This week I got a call and an email from some folks that are thinking of taking out their NetApp R200’s and NetApp FAS3050’s to replace them with IBM NAS5500’s . I mentioned to the customer that the NAS5500 is essentially the same unit that the NetApp equipment is, so I did not understand his motivation. I explained that NetApp’s Executives and IBM’s Executives were now best buddies and IBM was selling NetApp equipment and support services, so it really does not make any sense to trade in his NetApp equipment for rebadged NetApp equipment. I could not make any sense of this at all.

So I asked a buddy of mine how this deal could make any sense to NetApp, his answer was quite simple. NetApp gets to sell twice the equipment, so what do they care! And IBM’s sells equipment also! In his view it is good for the sales force, good for the stockholders and good for Zerowait also, since we will be getting a bunch of almost new equipment. Okay then, I hope this customer remembered to write ‘Transferable licenses required’ on his original PO to NetApp!

This type of arrangement is destined to fail in the High Tech marketplace, as the two sales forces will begin to compete among themselves. However, as a consumer electronics marketing ploy it makes lots of sense. Rebadge the product to get into different market niches. Imagine spending several hundred thousand dollars for a piece of equipment that is sold just like a DVD player. Perhaps NetApp views IBM sales as incremental?

Perhaps NetGear and Zetera should watch out as NetApp enters the consumers electonics & storage arena. When will Circuit City and Best Buys be advertising NetApp at a store near you?

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

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him – David Brinkley

Over the last week we sold several NetApp F840’s and F820’s. Some of these have had transferable licenses. We have also sent out quite a few DS14 shelves with 72GB drives and 144GB drives. Additionally, we installed an NetApp R100 and are expecting to be installing several more licensed filers in the next few weeks. The outlook for our systems and parts sales is excellent for 2006.

We have also picked up an astonishing number of NetApp service and hardware support contracts in the last few weeks. As I have said in the past, the more we sell the more we seem to need to inventory. And this is for two reasons, first we take our commitment to our support customers very seriously, so we stock an enormous amount of NetApp spares. Second, the more we sell the more folks learn about us, and so our stocking levels need to increase to support our growing customer base.

We are now working on building up our stocking levels of NetApp FAS940, NetApp FAS960 and NetApp R150 parts. Depending on your Zip Code may now be able to supply you from our 4 hour parts depots.

I have long said that there are more leaks in Washington than in Anheuser- Busch’s biggest men’s room – Barry Goldwater

Jon Toigo is working on fixing the security leaks in commercial software. I think he is on to something here, and his blog is worth a read on the subject.

Whether you agree with him or not, software security is a big problem and one which needs to be addressed, Senator Goldwater tried to stop congressional leaks 20 years ago, and got nowhere. I hope Jon has better luck with the software vendors.

We want our customers to say that is a hell of a product, not that is a hell of an ad – Leo Burnett

Our Zerowait High Availability Exception Reporter is starting to get some very good press. Our friend Jon Toigo, who helped us define the product in its early stages had the following to say in his ESJ article.

Also worthy of mention is Zerowait. Lately a purveyor of used Network Appliance Filers and a provider of service and support for NetApp customers, CEO Mike Linett and company have started looking into the realm of storage management at the prompting of some of their customers. If you use a lot of Network Appliance gear, check out http://www.zpiphany.com for a sample of Zerowait’s new product, called Zpiphany. It will review your Filer (installation) configuration, tell how efficient your storage is in a simple pie chart, compare your storage efficiency to their sample population of hundreds of filers, and interpret your weekly logs to provide simple-to-follow solutions to your filers’ error messages from their library of solutions. Zpiphany is provided as part of the company’s NetApp Service and support contracts, or available at less than $5.00 a day to customers who want to use it to maximize their NetApp storage infrastructure, no matter who provides the hardware support or how much storage is attached to the Filer.

I like the Zpiphany model a lot and hope that it will be expanded to include other brands of storage products from other vendors—especially those who seek to conceal allocation and utilization data from the “prying eyes” of their own customers. Linett is open to all offers, should any vendors want to assist their customers with this kind of concise reporting service.

The Imelda Factor in Storage – Spending money like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store.

Let me paint a picture for you – Imagine spending several hundred thousand dollars for a NetApp 3050 Cluster with ATA drives that is only doing 3 OPS. Sitting next to it is an 12 TB R100 with 2 TB of data on it doing 100 OPS. Nearby is a F840 Cluster with 3 TB doing 300 OPS, and next to is a NetApp F820 Cluster with 3 TB doing 200 OPS.

Considering the number of OPS and the amount of storage on these units why would this customer purchase the 3050 cluster? I call this the Imelda Factor in storage purchases , when a sales person convinces a customer that they absolutely need the newest piece of equipment, even if it does not meet the needs or requirements of the application. A persuasive sales person can paint a very nice picture, but that picture is not going to solve a real problem, no matter how good it looks, or how much you spend.

Sometimes it pays to get an outside opinion from a company not affiliated with a storage vendor. It might save your company several hundred thousands of dollars.

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is ” The computer is down” – Norman Augustine

A NetApp hardware support customer called us earlier this week from a well known laboratory. They love their NetApp filer and are locked into NetApp’s technology. They can’t afford to upgrade and they can’t afford the $40,000.00 for yearly support that NetApp is quoting them for their F840. They heard about us through the grapevine and wanted to know whether we could meet their budget requirements and support their filer. “Of course we can”, I told them.

It looks like we have picked up another customer for our NetApp third party support. This customer was really impressed with our value added services which includes our High Availability Exception Reporter.

If you are interested in seeing how your NetApp filer compares to others in our sample population, give us a call and we will tell you how to get a sample of the Exception reporter for your filer.

“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