Zerowait Corporation

“Many persons have an idea that one cannot be in business and lead an upright life, whereas the truth is that no one succeeds in business to any great extent, who misleads or misrepresents” John Wanamaker

Zerowait has built a business on supporting NetApp’s customers with an affordable alternative to their overpriced service, support and upgrade pricing. Often our customers can purchase the identical parts from us for 50% of what NetApp charges.

On Service and Support, former NetApp customers are saving thousands of dollars every year with our hardware maintenance contracts. Yesterday, we had a fellow come in who wants to work with us on developing our South American sales. He had heard about us through various contacts of his, he thinks that we should work on growing our business there. It is an interesting opportunity and one that we are now discussing internally. We currently do about 20 % of our business in Europe and Asia. But we have only a few customers in South America.

Developing a parts depot, and service and support facility in South America is an interesting idea. We had discussed opening up a European operation over the past couple of years, which based on our customer demand makes some sense. But now there is another growth opportunity to investigate.

Uninterrupted Email on a budget – saving your tax dollars!

A couple of years ago we started working with the folks at NASA on a storage solution for their email. It was a pleasure working with the folks at NASA as they were dedicated to creating an email solution on a budget – performance and reliability were important, not a slick sales presentation. The engineers at NASA realized that they could use transferable licensed NetApp units and Zerowait support services and save the taxpayer a small fortune. A few of their engineers came to our Demo Lab and worked with our engineers to develop a completely redundant solution. They no longer have to worry about losing emails, and the system has been running reliably for a couple of years now. If you would like to know more about this simple and reliable email solution, send us an email and I will forward it to the NASA engineers for you.

Zerowait helps many companies develop high availability solutions that provide security through disaster prevention. Although today our company is known for providing affordable storage solutions, we still do a lot of work with companies helping them engineer high availability solutions of all kinds.

Competitive pricing for NetApp support

The other day I was talking to a NetApp customer and I asked what I thought was a very simple question. ‘Have you ever gotten a competitive price quote on any of your NetApp equipment.’ His answer was ‘no’. I asked him “why not?”

It always seems odd to me when I run into a customer that does not want to get the best price for his storage infrastructure’s components and support. But I am also surprised that the NetApp customer that spends $500,000.00 on his Filer will not negotiate the Contract terms of NetApp’s contract. Why would the same person who negotiates on terms on his new house or his new BMW or Lexus not negotiate with NetApp? Why not ask for transferable licenses for your NetApp filer? Would you buy a BMW if you could not sell the right to use it after three years? Why not ask NetApp to allow you to discuss the performance of the filer with other people? Can you imagine not being able to talk about the performance of your BMW? According to NetApp’s contract you can’t discuss performance.

There is something very odd in the marketing and sales of enterprise storage equipment. Why don’t customers think they can negotiate better deals on their new equipment from NetApp? A simple tactic when negotiating for upgrades or support with NetApp is to ask Zerowait for a competitive quote for upgrades, service and support. Show them our quote and see if they change their prices because of competition, it can’t hurt to try!

Zerowait provides excellent and affordable options for NetApp upgrades, service and support.

I was shooting pool in Latrobe, PA recently with a friend and customer and we got to talking about the relative costs of computer storage for his company. This has been an on going discussion for many months and in many different locations . Over several months we have discovered that it is actually very hard to nail down the costs of storage in a large company. How do you account for staff per TB of storage? How do you account for operational expenses like heat, light, cooling, electric per TB of storage?

I started asking these same questions of some of our other customers, and now we have a whole bunch of people trying to figure out how can a company accurately charge your expense overhead to your storage infrastructure?

A follow up question to ask your vendors at time of purchase is what is the maintenance and support costs of the storage going to be for the lifespan of the storage equipment. These costs have a direct affect on the cost of your storage management.

What does it cost to run storage equipment for storage that is never or rarely accessed? How much does that cost in electricity? It seems logical that higher storage density should be less expensive to operate. But is it? Perhaps some of our readers can help us to answer these questions?

Where are you going with your storage architecture? What is your destination?
Are you looking just to solve today’s storage problems or do you have a 3 to 5 year strategic storage plan?

Most of the customers we deal with on a regular basis have a strategic storage plan. They like their NetApp equipment and they plan to stay with their architecture for a few years. One problem that these satisfied customers run into is that they have a homogeneous environment that is easy to maintain and has a single type of Storage shelf and head. But if they need to add equipment they find that NetApp has superseded their units. So they must either purchase a dissimilar unit or find a secondary source that stocks older equipment.

Often they find Zerowait, and are happy to learn that we not only stock the equipment, but also have transferable software protocol licenses from NetApp. So if you are looking to expand your superseded NetApp equipment, please give us a call. Zerowait stocks a huge variety of NetApp equipment at affordable prices.

Affordable NetApp service and support – no matter where you are

Over the last few years we have built an international business providing parts, service and support to Network Appliance users. Typically, NetApp customers call us after their initial warranty has expired and NetApp provides them with a service and support quote which is quite expensive. A few months ago, NetApp quoted a midwestern state government over $100,000 for their F760 service and support. Our quote was considerably less and Zerowait got the business.Recently, we started receiving requests to provide three (3) year service contracts to our clients. And now we have created a three year ZPA service and support plan that provides our customers with long term storage support and services at a very reasonable price.

If you have a large NetApp infrastucture and are looking for ways to reduce your operational storage costs, please give us a call. Zerowait has an excellent reputation for providing an affordable alternative to NetApp for upgrades, service and support.

Storage Pool & Islands of Storage

No matter how you look at it, when you have a storage problem all of your storageseems to be in one place. One data center, One storage system, One back up, and if is not up and running you have got One big problem.

Is your storage easy to access?
Is the storage performance acceptable to your average user?
Can you add more and fatter pipes to improve performance?
Is your storage pool filled with files that never get accessed?
Is the pool filled with empty storage disks that never get used?
How much does it cost to keep unused storage running?
How much does it cost to run a storage pool that can’t be accessed?
How much is your maintenance and support costing per TB of storage?

Zerowait can help you answer these questions, so you can provide cost effective storage solutions to your user base. Zerowait Specializes in providing an affordable alternative to NetApp for service, support and upgrades.

Sometimes you are out there and all alone.

Who are you going to call for your NetApp hardware support when you recognize that you might have a problem? Obviously you can call the manufacturer, their SE’s are excellent. But they are going to provide you with answers and solutions to help them sell and support their proprietary solutions. Your network configuration might not fit their standard tool set, or you might be running a combination of legacy filers and newer equipment and you have some questions. If this is the situation you are in. Zerowait can help. Our engineers service, support & maintain hundreds of filers in a tremendous variety of applications and environments. Our customers range from the one man IT staff to the largest outsourcing companies. Zerowait is the recognized leader in third party NetApp support.

So, although you might feel like you are all alone, with a Zerowait support contract and service agreement you can be certain that the best technical staff is there to help you with your most complex NetApp problems.

“Success, the real success, does not depend upon the position you hold but upon how you carry yourself in that position.” Theodore Roosevelt

When is the last time you reviewed your cost of storage? Recently I was meeting with a customer and they wanted to know what their cost per GB was and also their cost of operating their storage infrastructure. At Zerowait, we use a cost estimate of $1.00 a day for each head and $1.00 a day per storage shelf.
When folks ask us to estimate their storage costs we have to ask some questions to ascertain whether they want us to figure fully weighted costs or only acquisition costs and estimated direct operational costs. Some customers of ours can provide with their costs for manpower and their cost allocation for square foot of space. But most of our customers can provide us with acquisition costs .
Even so an analysis we ran recently showed that on a particular filer 7.8% of the filer was being used for MP3 files and almost 10% of the files had not been accessed in over a year. My question is what is it costing to have mainline storage used up by files that are not used or are not relevant to your business operations. I wonder how much it is costing filer users to keep this data in the primary storage assets.

If our competitors saw us walking across the Hudson River, they would say it was because we can’t swim.

Building a partnership with our customers depends on our ability to deliver what we promise on time. Visiting customers and discussing their problems with them is the best way we know to be able to provide them with the service and support they need.

Last week, in Colorado, I met with several clients who had unique requirements for their short term projects. Over the next week we are going to be working with them to
provide them short term solutions for their project’s storage requirements. Keep us in mind if you are looking for an inexpensive solution for a project or data migration.

Zerowait provides affordable alternatives to NetApp for upgrades, service and support.