Zerowait Corporation

End of year Scheduling.

As the end of the year approaches, we typically get a flurry of calls from folks who need a NetApp solution installed before the year end. Typically folks want both a trained NetApp engineer and NetApp equipment to meet their requirements. Scheduling sometimes gets a bit tight, but we can usually meet everyone’s requirements.

Currently we are working on a few installation projects scheduled for the next few weeks. So if you are in a hurry give us a call soon!

Zerowait provides affordable alternatives for NetApp equipment, service and support.

Storage and Security

On Thursday I met with Jon Toigo in Washington DC for a few hours. We discussed many subjects, but most of our time was spent discussing security and the lack of common sense in the industry. Vendors are focused on their technical solutions when selling to customers and sell security as if it were some magic software, and yet they sell their storage equipment with every cabinet keyed alike. Would you put your most valuable possessions in a bank where all safety deposit boxes had the same key? Of course not!

Ronald Reagan said ‘Trust but Verify’, it is good advice for customers involved in the data storage and data security business today.

Lot’s of times we have customers call us who need to rent a few TB of NetApp storage for a data migration or for a special project. As we have in an enormous stock of NetApp storage shelves we can usually configure an affordable NetApp storage rental solution to fit your budget and short term requirements. If you have a short term NetApp Filer requirement, give us a call. 888.811.0808

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.