Zerowait Corporation

NetApp Transferable Licenses -NetApp R100, NetApp FAS940, NetApp F840, NetApp 820 and NetApp F810 – these systems are certified by NetApp and eligible for NetApp support or our ZPA coverage.

Zerowait stocks systems with transferable
NetApp licenses. We have NFS, CIFS,
Cluster & ISCSI protocols available.
We sell a lot of these systems and support hundreds of filers in the field. But for one reason or another, we occasionally hear that a NetApp sales person has told a customer that there is no such thing as a transferable licensed NetApp system. Whether NetApp sales people are misinformed by their management, or just trying to muddy the waters we can’t tell you. But we can prove that there are transferable licenses available. If you want a copy of the documentation simply send us an email and we will send you a PDF of a unit we have in stock.

Zerowait’s staff is dedicated to providing NetApp customers with outstanding value for their storage dollar. Customers can save 50% on a transferable licensed filer as compared to a new filer, and they can save even more if they decide to use Zerowait’s third party service and support for NetApp equipment.

NetApp Storage Costs

Can you look at the cost of your NetApp storage in isolation? By its very definition Network Attached Storage needs to have a Network for it to work. How do you include network costs in your cost of storage? How do you include network management in your cost of storage? Suppose that, as in many organizations we support, the storage folks don’t run the network and the network budget is under a different department.

How do you account for the cost of storage? Working with some of our customers we came up with a way to account for storage costs which will include the costs of networking, manpower required and data center overhead costs. It is one of the many services that we provide.

Zerowait has hundreds of NetApp filers under support, and I can’t think of any one of these systems that works in isolation. Our engineers have to know about networking, routing, backup and restore processes to solve the questions they are asked everyday by our customers. A few weeks ago our engineers were working with a customer to improve their storage speeds. The filers were not taxed at all, the problem was in the network. Now that the problem has been identified, another department needs to address it. I wonder if the network folks will call it a storage problem or a network bottleneck in their budget request?

So when someone asks us what does NetApp cost, we have to ask what kind of Network infrastructure they have and what their future needs will be. At Zerowait we provide affordable alternatives to NetApp for service, support and upgrades – but we also provide engineering and integration services that include the network in the cost of the process.

“We’re not junk, we’re not scrap, and we won’t be treated that way!”
— From the movie ROBOTS.

As most of our readers know, we do a tremendous business in NetApp replacement parts. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I would say that you can break the reasons down into three major categories

1) Parts prices – If Zerowait has the parts you are looking for we will attempt to provide the part at the most competitvie price possible. We offer the NetApp parts with either a 30 day standard warranty or optional 1 year or 3 year NBD parts replacement. Most of our popular NetApp parts are listed at www.thezerowaitstore.com, so you can shop and compare.

2) Parts compatibility – Zerowait’s staff is recognized for our knowledge of parts compatibility among NetApp’s user community. We can tell you which shelves, adapters and drives will work with different filers, and we can tell you the versions of software that will work also.

3) Service and support – Zerowait’s engineers are constantly doing NetApp Migrations, NetApp Mirrors, and installations. We provide outstanding and affordable NetApp service and support for our customers.

These are the main reasons why our NetApp customer list keeps growing, but there are many others. If you would like to learn how you can save money on your next NetApp upgrade, please give us a call at 888.811.0808.

Over the holiday weekend I spoke to a few friends about their operational costs of storage. These guys work at a major bank with offices & Data Centers all over the world. They know that Zerowait provides service and support for NetApp equipment, and they were alarmed about the cost of storage support from NetApp and their other storage providers. We discussed their infrastructure, their utilization rates, and their actual cost of storage. Low utilization rates did not bother them, and neither did the acquisition costs of their storage.

Paying millions of dollars for NetApp parts and support really annoys them, they can’t see the value. It was an interesting discussion because it seems that even the biggest banks in the world have the same cost control concerns that so many of our customers have.

Economics teaches us that there are always alternatives, the choices that the manufacturer makes about their continuing service and support costs are as important to their business as is their initial offering costs. Sooner or later the customers will start looking for lower cost replacement solutions. Many NetApp customers have already determined that Zerowait provides an affordable alternative for NetApp service and support.

Thanksgiving holiday

Zerowait will be closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. We want to wish all of our customers and their families the happiest of holidays. I also want to thank my employees for their hard work and dedication to this company and our customers.

This has been a great year for Zerowait, our business has grown and so has our staff. Have a great Holiday!

“I love Thanksgiving. It’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.” Arnold Schwarzenegger

Can anyone verify this statement by NetApp’s CEO in Byte and switch?
Dan Warmenhoven, CEO of Network Appliance. “NetApp provides customers with the best storage utilization rates in the industry, allowing them to decrease their total cost of ownership and increase their return on investment.”

If you look at this analysis of a NetApp filer you will see that NetApp parity, NetApp’s file system and NetApp’s right sizing of NetApp disks take a significant proportion of the NetApp storage a customer purchases In this example, usable NetApp storage and NetApp set asides are about equal. Can it be that other storage vendors are worse at managing storage assets? It would be interesting to get these results from other vendors also.

At the end of the day, your cost of NetApp storage is dependant on how much of the raw storage capacity is used by the vendor’s file system and overhead.

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands. Peter Drucker

What causes a customer to no longer trust a brand? Where does he turn for a trusted advisor?

In our own lives for a variety of reasons most of us have turned to a new car repair shop because we no longer trust the local dealer’s work. This happend to me about 8 years ago, I had a grinding sound in my cars front end. It was pretty obvious that I was having a spindle bearing problem. I first brought my car to the local Ford dealer, they told me there was nothing wrong and charged me for the time they spent. I was perplexed because I knew through research that there was a recall on the spindle bearings and Ford would pay to replace them. However, my local dealer would not listen to me. The next week I went to another Ford dealer, I explained the problem to the service supervisor and I told him that the other dealer would not fix the problem. He smiled and said not to worry, the problem was a known service problem and they would fix it at no charge.

The new dealer won a customer, the old dealer lost my business.

Zerowait tries to understand our customers needs and create affordable NetApp support solutions for them. It appears that Peter Drucker was correct, while in California last week, I learned that many of our customers trust the Zerowait brand and our concentration on providing an affordable alternative to NetApp’s high prices.

Dateline California

I have been in California the last few days visiting with NetApp service and support customers of ours. The first thing I notice when I come to California is that gas is about .50 a gallon more than in Delaware, and the traffic is incredible. Last night a bunch of old friends and I got together at the the steelhead brew pub in Burlingham. The crowd consisted of 3 former NetApp executives,a customer and myself. The beer was very good and the food was delicious. The conversation revolved around NetApp’s strategic direction, tactical moves and where technology was going.
After a while everyone agreed that there does not seem to be a true strategic direction at all, but more of a 24 months or less view of the storage marketplace. Everyone agreed with me that financially storage assets are depreciated over a 3 to 5 year period, so it odd that NetApp does not align itself withthe customer view of their product’s lifecycle.

Over a couple of hours we discussed many things and the parallels with SGI path since 1995 were astonishing. What is the strategic direction of NetApp? Does anyone know anymore?
For storage customers with critical data it is a prime concern, what happens if your proprietary storage vendor goes off course and you can’t depend on them anymore?

What do you do when your critical NetApp data slips off the information super highway.

Step one is always to get things back up and running again, so traffic is not backed up to all of your clients and other applications. But at step two there is a fork in the road, Many companies go into break fix mode and then go into their RCA (root cause analysis) mode. Many times the RCA process is painful and so it is also know as a Root Canal Analysis in some circles.

Typically a simple oversight caused the data outage, and it is usually a simple fix. The cause of the oversight can be many things. We recently heard about a power outage in a data center that caused a filer to reboot. However, over time the filer had had shelves and drives added to it from another NetApp filer. So when the NetApp filer tried to reboot it found two boot volumes. The NetApp filer went into a cycle of reboots.

The Root Cause Analysis in this incident showed that the filer had foreign volumes. But who added the volumes, and why didn’t they zero the drives? Adding NetApp shelves from one NetApp filer to another is easy to do, you just have to follow the right sequence for the shelf type you are using. Following a list of procedures when working with your critical NetApp data storage is an easy way to make certain that you don’t foul up your critical data storage, and also have a back out plan.

When landing under instrument conditions you should always read the missed approach portion of the landing procedure before you need it. It is always easier to be prepared then to have to react without knowledge. If you are concerned about your NetApp storage migration and want a helping hand, give Zerowait a call, you will be glad you did.