Zerowait Corporation

Businessweek has another interesting article on NetApp.
Here is the link http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051227_828715.htm

Here are some interesting links:

People who know you know that you’re outspoken on the topic of stock-option expensing. What are some of the other issues you feel passionately about?
Sarbanes Oxley. It may go a long way toward increasing shareholders’ confidence in Corporate America, but it won’t diminish fraud and other types of unethical behavior. New controls will just be abrogated the same way the old ones were.

Look at MCI and Enron. They’re not being prosecuted based on new code. Those cases are based on laws that were already in place. So I really think it was a futile effort to try to legislate business ethics. And it has had a set of consequences that aren’t helpful. For example, I used to have a much closer consultative relationship with our auditors, but you really can’t do that anymore. You almost need a separate team of financial consultants so you can then go to your auditors and say, “Here’s where we stand.”

You shouldn’t be able to control your auditors, but you ought to be able to ask their opinion — to ask, “Is this something you’d support, or that you’d have a problem with?”

We used to do that all the time. Instead, our audit fees have doubled [since SOX was implemented], and the value derived has halved. So I think SOX took a terrific 10-year relationship we had with Deloitte & Touche and made it far less productive.

Is SOX an isolated problem, or is there a larger concern?
I think the whole attitude toward business in America these days is still suffering from the abuses of the bubble period. But the long-term consequences are that we will diminish America’s competitiveness. You can see it through the brain drain. If you can’t get the big options package here — well, they don’t have that problem in India or China. So I’m not sure the American people and politicians are thinking about this as a global issue.

I personally think we’re heading right down the same track Europe has been on. They’ve got great education [systems] and excellent people, but name a successful European computer company? They’ve dampened the entrepreneurial spirit and the opportunity to create a highly successful enterprise. So my fear is that we’re going to end up pushing a lot of investment and entrepreneurs to other countries that we really ought to be considering our competitors on the world stage. I’m glad I had my era when I did, because my son’s era is going to be a lot tougher.

But isn’t that a cop-out? You and other tech CEOs in your 50s have made your money, and yet you’re for the most part just pointing to the problems rather than offering real solutions. Shouldn’t your generation of CEOs be doing more?
You’re right. I’ve made my money, and I can live happily after. But I don’t think we’re empowered to stand up. That may be a cop-out. But the attitude toward business is still pretty negative, particularly toward tech.

Perhaps Mr. Warmenhoven should read some Adam Smith to get some perspective for his views of capitalism.
“Every individual…generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

There is a very interesting article in Business week about NetApp, that is worth reading.

Here is the link – http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051227_204146.htm

I think the following pieces are very interesting.

Indeed, NetApp has gone on to dominate the red-hot market for so-called network attach storage (NAS) gear — and in the process create the only significant new hardware company of the last 15 years. NetApp is not only notching hefty sales (expected to hit $2 billion in fiscal 2006) but it has also managed to maintain sky-high 60%-plus gross margins, despite building its gear with commodity, off-the-shelf parts. And it has done it all while brushing off offensives from far larger companies, such as Microsoft (MSFT) and EMC (EMC), which many felt sure would mark NetApp’s doom.

While Cisco designs many of its own network processors, NetApp’s hardware uses chips from Intel and others. “We’re state-of-the-shelf, not state-of-the-art,” he says.

The article does not ever state what NetApp’s CEO thinks of creating long term customer relationships, the article never discusses NetApp’s sales strategy of End of Lifing products to force customer upgrades.

“Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.” Edison

Working with our staff and customers on problems we often find that Edison was correct. What has puzzled us for quite a while is why it seems that in Benjamin Franklin’s time, inventors were younger than they seem today. But here is an article which I have linked to that seems to explain why this may be. I suggest reading the complete article, it is not very long.

Innovative thinkers are innovating later than they used to. While conventional wisdom holds that creative thinkers do their best work when they are young, a study by NBER researcher Benjamin Jones shows that over the past century the average age at which individuals produce notable inventions and ideas has increased steadily.

Jones notes that, unlike athletes, who do not require increased training demands over time, innovators appear to spend increasingly significant portions of their early years in education – a kind of human capital acquisition that might well explain the age trends in his study. Because the rules and requirements of their fields of endeavor remain fixed, athletes are not obliged to increase their human capital; accordingly, the data show no distributional shift in the ages of top athletes over the years. But thinkers must increasingly invest in acquiring intellectual capital, and the accumulation of knowledge – the rising distance to the frontier – can explain increased educational attainment.

Jones notes that economists have not focused much on the human capital investments of innovators. Because innovators customarily devote their youngest and perhaps brightest years to acquiring their education, understanding the tradeoffs at the beginning of the life-cycle may be of primary importance for understanding the ultimate output of these individuals – and for understanding why great innovation is steadily declining among younger thinkers.

Have a great holiday!

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.
Ronald Reagan

In storage, I see no end of hard problems. I see customers’ data growing, and I see customers worried about consolidating, operating and protecting increasing amounts of data. I see the burden of ownership for data getting worse as businesses rely more and more on the data they own, and as the legal requirements increase to keep data accessible yet private. No end of problems in sight. Dave Hitz

Will Storage and Network Technology make it easier or harder in the next few years to manage and secure your data storage? As technologies standardize storage and security will certainly get easier, specialty niche markets will develop on new technologies and entrepreneurs will jump into these new niches and develop businesses based on them. My prediction is that entrenched vendors will fight to maintain their profits in their business lines, and slowly markets will be taken away from them by lower cost solutions.

Listening to your customers is the best way to assure that any business can continue, for any business today must evolve with its customer base, and watch for new niches as they develop. Toigo Partners and Zerowait are having an exclusive storage roundtable in a few weeks to discuss storage economics & business, we will report back on the trends we foresee developing.

From – Investors Business Daily “Following the herd is a sure way to mediocrity”
Why are all the storage vendors getting into security?

Is your NetApp filer’s data worth $5.00 a day? If your business depends on your data it probably is. Ask Zerowait if you are concerned about your filer’s performance and security, and how for $5.00 a day you can sleep at night.

“I didn’t really say everything I said.” Yogi Berra

This NetApp Press release seems to contradict the NetApp statement that follows it: How can something win a best product in 2003 and be introduced in 2005? The FAS250 seems to have done so.

Sunnyvale, Calif. – November 5, 2003 — Network Appliance, Inc., announced today the FAS250 has been named as the Best Product in the online hardware and management software category at Forum Stockage 2003 in Paris. This is the second year that NetApp has been honored, with the FAS900 winning the special award for Innovation in 2002. This international exhibition is dedicated to all aspects of storage and data protection and is one of the most important European events in the storage industry.

But today we learn that the FAS250 was released this year.
NetApp’s product line-up has been strong. Informs Thomas, “The entry-level FAS 250 and FAS 270 which debuted this year made a big contribution to our growth.”

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
George Santayana

Often we get call for emergency technical support for customers with NetApp equipment. It takes commitment to provide this type of support. But customers depend on their Netapp filers for Mission Critical data storage, and when a filer is not serving data, it can be more than inconvenient,it can be quite costly. Over the last few years we have built a reputation for providing outstanding support and going the extra mile. Most of our largest support accounts still come to us by reference and word of mouth. Providing independent third party service and support for NetApp Filers allows us to provide our customers with solutions that don’t always support NetApp’s marketing and sales pitches.

If you have a difficult problem with your NetApp filer, and you are looking for an answer please give us a call. If you have a impossible problem – we would like to hear from you also.

Trust but Verify: Ronald Reagan

Do you believe the claims made by your storage vendor’s marketing brochures? Do you believe the claims made by their marketing and sales folks? Can you renegotiate your contract terms if their performance does not meet their claims?

JonToigo touches on the issues relating to this in a blog over the weekend….

Prove It!

When a vendor makes a claim about the performance and value I am supposed to obtain from their stuff, they ought to be able to prove it. Stupid ROI calculators don’t fit the bill. They are tools for marketing that cannot capture my real operating or support costs, since I generally don’t know what they are and cannot contribute them to the equation anyway. I need performance data to help me compare products from several vendors who are competing for my business.

Zerowait is finishing up our tools that will be available very soon, they will provide NetApp Storage managers insights into how efficient their NetApp storage infrastructure is in comparison to our sample population of NetApp systems which we monitor. The interesting thing about our tools is that as we get more and more NetApp systems under our support program, we also get a better and better view of how efficient the sample population’s storage is. The more customers we gather, the better the information. This model works in much the same way as a Barracuda firewall does. As more Barracuda’s are sold, more spam is caught.

Is the mission critical data on your NetApp filer worth $5.00 a day? If so, you may want to call Zerowait.

Ask the Zerowait Engineer…

We received the following question from a customer…..

Your web site is saying some people reported 30% overhead with ZCS checksums. Performance-wise, should we opt for FC9s shelves with BCS drives?

If you are running your filers at 80-90% capacity then you might benefit from the extra speed of the BCS drives. If your filers are not maxed out then the extra benefit is minimal. The real advantage to the FC9 and DS14 shelves is not their ability to use BCS drives, but rather their ability to run large drives. The FC8 shelf power supplies aren’t rated to handle the larger drives. Also the FC9 and DS14 shelves can be multi-pathed for redundancy. Generally, most people would not upgrade or change to BCS drives for the possible performance increase unless the filer is near capacity. If you see a “value add” in the other advantages, however, then it might be worth looking into.

The BCS are faster due to the ability to write the checksum into the extra blocks in the format. This saves time having to pull the checksum from the disk.

Is your filer’s data worth $5.00 a day? If so, you may want to call Zerowait.

Incremental cost of storage software to the manufacturer. Today I got a call from a NetApp customer and he complained about the costs of NetApp software licenses. I told him that we had transferable NetApp licenses & I explained that he could negotiate with NetApp since the incremental cost to NetApp of an additional license sale was essentially $0.00 . I then pointed him to an article about software pricing which helps explain NetApp’s pricing formula. I have some excepts here.

“The more you pay, the more it’s worth” goes the ironic old saying. But when Shapiro and Varian argue the benefits of personal pricing, they turn the old saying on its head and it becomes “the more it’s worth to you, the more you should pay.” Personal pricing is a practice where the information product vendor makes an offer to the prospective purchaser based upon a calculation of what the vendor believes the prospective purchaser is willing to pay.

“Let’s take everybody’s favorite (or least favorite) example, airline pricing,” says Varian. “You can fly from here to New York on a full fare basis, it’s two thousand bucks. If you stay overnight on a Saturday and purchase with a two-week advance notice then it’s maybe four hundred bucks. So now you have to ask yourself, if they could only charge one fare, which would it be. Would it be closer to two thousand or closer to four hundred? And I say it would be closer to two thousand because of the business traffic: business people who have to go! They’re the ones with the inelastic demand. What’s happening is the airlines are reaching out and offering this deal to fill up the empty seats. My claim would be that people are better off because airlines have engaged in that price differentiation.”

Is your filer’s data worth $5.00 a day? Curious? Ask Zerowait!

Looking to lower your cost of NetApp Maintenance?
You are not alone!
“NetApp worked fine for us,” he said. “It’s not a bad product at all — it was the cost of maintenance that was a problem.” Barbieri said that he was interested in a next-generation product from NetApp, “but it’s not going to be ready for another year or two, and they didn’t give me an upgrade path to it.”

Many customers turn to Zerowait for continuing service, support and upgrades of NetApp equipment. If you love the reliability of NetApp’s Ontap operating system, but are astonished by their costs give Zerowait a call 888.811.0808.

Is the data on your NetApp filer worth $5.00 a day? More information soon!