Zerowait Corporation

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!

Quantum leaps or stepping on your customers?

Recently NetApp’s Dave Hitz has been writing about the quantum leaps that his company is taking. But as NetApp makes it’s leaps it seems to leave many customers behind. As NetApp’s customers recently learned, NetApp announced end of availabiltiy of its NetCache C1200 & C2100 products. These join a long list of products that NetApp has end of lifed. When NetApp ends a product their customers have come to expect a price increase on that product’s support services. But customers are getting wise to this tactic, and are increasingly relying on NetApp third party support companies to provide ongoing NetApp support and NetApp parts services. Many of NetApp customers are also puzzled by the pricing of NetApp protocol licenses, they realize that the incremental cost to NetApp of each additional license sold is near $0.00. So they wonder aloud in conversations with us why they are charging outrageous sums for these licenses. I assure them that NetApp is negotiable on software license pricing and it never hurts to negotiate with them aggresively and I always suggest that they request license transferability.

Zerowait specializes in third party support for NetApp equipment. We provide parts, service and support for NetApp’s F760, F740, F720, F810, F820, F825, F840 & F880. We also support the Netcache C1100, C1105,C1200, c2100, C760 and C720. If you are looking for an affordable alternative for your NetApp support why not give us a call?

NetApp sells used parts!
NetApp needs to recycle defective parts, many of which can be repaired, as quickly as possible. Product lifecycles in the high-tech world are notoriously short. A single circuit board might undergo 20 revisions over seven years, notes Fabiaschi. Yet customers are receiving brand new boards only between 20 and 30 percent of the time. The trick is to maximize the use of a given part before it reaches its inevitable moment of obsolescence.

The other day a large company’s engineer called us up for a quote on some NetApp cards, we quoted him and then he wrote us back that he was concerned about the cards being used. I can understand his concern, especially since NetApp charges new prices for cards that are more often used then new according to the article above.

Zerowait sells used NetApp parts, we test them and guarantee them. And Zerowait will save you a bunch of money !

Can you decipher your NetApp Log files?
Do you know what all of the NetApp error messages mean?
When is the last time you read through your NetApp log files?
Zerowait works with our NetApp customers to take the mystery out
of their log files. Understanding your NetApp log files can help you avoid serious problems down the road, but can also help you understand how to optimize your NetApp filer now. If you have some specific questions about your log files and some of the messages why not give us a call? At Zerowait we have the answers to your most vexing NetApp questions.

We were talking to a NetApp Customer the other day about upgrade options for his NetApp Storage Infrastructure. He told us that his NetApp representative had told them that the only option they had for service and support was to upgrade their systems as NetApp was no longer going to support their NetApp F720, F740 & F760 Hardware. He was non plussed as the hardware has worked unfailingly for years. He had heard about Zerowait from some of his friends in the business and called us. We processed his request for a quote for a ZPA policy for service and support and sent it off with a few references.

Later in the day he called us back and told us that he was forwarding our quote to his purchasing department because he was impressed with the comments he heard from the references we sent. He also told us that our other customers had told him about some of the other things we do, and he was interested in some of our NetApp engineering & NetApp migration services also.

Zerowait ships NetApp parts all over the world

Sometimes folks call us and are surprised how many NetApp customers we have and where we cover NetApp systems. NetApp customers all over the world have the same concerns and want to be treated fairly. Unlike many competitors, Zerowait has one price list for customers – domestic & international customers are encouraged to purchase off our web store for the same price. We also have dealers and partners that we deal with in Asia, Europe and South America. Sometimes, our partners work with us to provide on site engineering support through a region, and also act as a parts depot for us.

Whether you are looking for a transferable licensed NetApp R100, an emergency shipment of replacement parts, or a service and support plan, Zerowait specializes in NetApp equipment and we look forward to helping you.