Zerowait Corporation

Who is watching your back?

Recently there has been a lot of press about the storage security problem,
And Dave Hitz of NetApp in his blog has written extensively about the security issue. He ends his blog last week with.

The bottom line is that for many applications, there is simply no practical alternative to cryptographic deletion, and lacking any practical solution, what people are doing is nothing at all. To me, the question isn’t whether cryptographic deletion is perfect – the question is whether it’s better than anything else we’ve got.

In summary, even though locks aren’t perfect, I’m going to keep locking my house.

What has puzzled me for quite a while is the following question. If NetApp’s executives are so concerned about Data Security why are all of NetApp’s cabinets keyed alike?

If you are concerned about data security, a good place to start is by securing your data storage cabinets. Changing your NetApp cabinet locks is an inexpensive place to start. With thousands of NetApp cabinets sold, you can be sure that some nefarious folks have the keys to your data storage cabinet.

 Your legacy NetApp equipment is not a historic relic from a bygone era.

But I wonder how many NetApp filers will be running over 100 years from their manufacturing date? I can assure you that there are thousands of NetApp 700 series systems still running. Zerowait has the parts service and support to keep them going strong. A lot of our customers have older NetApp equipment that is still working fine and not even close to maxed out on the storage capacity. NetApp made thousands of F760’s and F840’s that were sold with only a TB or two of storage. Many of these machines are humming along nicely not even close to 50% of the IOPS that the equipmentis rated for. A few of our customers have done the cost comparisons between the acquisition cost of upgrading with NetApp’s new equipment and the option of upgrading the storage on their legacy NetApp equipment and putting the system under Zerowait maintenance. The savings were startling.

A lot of NetApp customers call us up because they want to add storage to their legacy equipment. But they run into costs or unavailability problems from their NetApp resellers and NetApp itself. So, they call Zerowait. We stock thousands of NetApp drives and hundreds of shelves of different varieties in our warehouse.We have heads available in 700 series, 800 series, 900 series and RXXX series units. Additionally we stock F85, F87, FAS250 and all sorts of adapters, cards and cables.

Zerowait is the affordable alternative to NetApp for parts, service, support and upgrades.

We probably have a NetApp customer near you already!

We feel it is important to visit our customers, and so I have to travel a lot, and so do our engineers. Our customers expect us to live up to our High Availability reputation, and we do. In the next couple of weeks, I will be visiting most of our customers in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana. And then I have to travel to the Southwest and Southern California. If you are considering your affordable alternatives to NetApp for service, support and upgrades and would like me to stop by. Just give us a call and we can try to match up my travel schedule with your availability.

If you are going to SNW 10/26 & 10/27 in Orlando, I will be there also.

Synchronizing time
It seems like such a simple concept. But when you have storage networks that span a wide area, things can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. When you are trying to move data between networks that are not synchronized, things can really get out of whack in a hurry. When critical storage devices have to fixed now, and not tomorrow, many NetApp customers rely on Zerowait.

Recently, we were working with a customer who has a NetApp cluster and things were not working correctly for him. He called us up, and told us his problems and our engineers started parsing out the issues. Once our engineers got all of the issues with firmware upgrades, volume sizes , dead disks and network issues figured out we were able to help them solve their problems pretty quickly.

Benjamin Franklin said ‘time is money’, and our customers recognize that when it comes to critical data storage infrastructures it is better to have the engineers at Zerowait on your team rather then wait to get things fixed Manana!

Zerowait provides expert advice on configuring NetApp storage systems, in addtion to providing an affordable alternative to NetApp’s high prices for service, support and upgrades.

Watching an expert sand casting a mold recently, I was reminded of the time and expertise it takes to properly configure a Storage Network. So many of the storage installations we work with are set up with the general configurations suggested by the manufacturer and are never performance optimized for Structured (database) or unstructured data.

With NetApp equipment in particular, there are lots of settings that have to be addressed to maximize performance. And our engineers are working with customers daily on helping them optimize their performance with their NetApp equipment. NetApp systems need to be set up right and also these settings need to be reviewed whenever you upgrade to a new version of OnTap. As NetApp upgrades firmaware and adds features sometimes things need to be tweaked. Zerowait’s engineers help customers around the world to optimize their NetApp performance. So, if you have NetApp systems that are not performing as well as you would like, why not give us a call? Zerowait’s engineers may be able to help you get your performance back.

More Data More Beer

Last week Dave Hitz blogged about a NetApp customer that pointed out that without their Data there woluld be no beer flowing. And that would be bad . You can read his blog here.

Zerowait is around the corner from the Iron Hill Brewery. After a succesful implementation for a customer we often go there to celebrate another High Availability NetApp storage installation. It really is a great place to go, the food is delicious and the variety of beers is fantastic. This week they have a Russian Imperial Stout on Special. It’s Great! However, I usually order the Porter. Talking about Data OnTap while drinking a fresh micro brew is a time honored tradition. When I am in Palo Alto, CA. I usually have a gathering of customers at the Gorden Biersch Brewery. And when I am in Boston and Cambridge Massachussets we often get together with customers at the Cambridge Brewery near Kendall Square. When I am in Boulder visiting customers we go to the Brewery downtown to get together. I wonder how the close relationship developed between succesful storage installations and Micro Brew Beer? During the week of October 17 I will be visitng with customers in Chicago, I wonder which brewery we will gather at?

As many of you know, who have visited us in our offices, Newark , DE is a small university town. But there are a lot of good taverns, bars and restaurants in town. If you are traveling between New York and Washington DC, and trying to control your NetApp storage upgrade or support costs give us a call, we are just off I 95. Talking about NetApp and Beer go well together, maybe that is why they call it Data OnTap?.

“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?