Zerowait Corporation

“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” — George Orwell

Our typical customer is looking for a choice in their sources of parts and service for NetApp equipment. As a proprietary vendor, NetApp tries as hard as it can to lock up its customers so that they will be the sole source provider of equipment and support for NetApp equipment. However, there are choices available for NetApp parts and service. Competition exists and NetApp’s dictatorship over upgrades, parts and support has some cracks in it.

Zerowait provides parts, service and support to some of the largest integration companies for their NetApp equipment. Our large and growing inventory of parts allows us to compete with NetApp in providing our customers with support levels that meet or exceed NetApp’s service and support.

Our transferable licensed NetApp filers, come with letters of transferability from NetApp and provide our customers substantial savings, we currently have FAS940’s in stock with NFS & CIFS Licenses. If you are looking at upgrading to a FAS940 why not compare our prices to the ones you get from NetApp? You will be glad you did!

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own set of laws.”
— Douglas Adams

When is the last time you heard a manager complain that everything is working perfectly? The old line about the squeaky wheel getting the oil is remains as true today as it was 100 years ago. Since NetApp equipment is so reliable the only squawks we here about are regarding NetApp’s high cost of service and continuing support. Zerowait specializes in providing affordable service, support and upgrades for NetApp storage equipment.

So if you are happy with your NetApp equipment but nervous about their maintenance prices, please give us a call. We hope you will join the Zerowait family of satisfied customers.

As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability – the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns. Joseph E. Stiglitz

In the IT storage world we have a large problem in defining how to measure storage productivity in a meaningful way. Zerowait is working on a set of tools that will provide this information in an easy to understand format. Working with our customers, we are helping them to define their storage costs, operational costs and on going maintenance costs. Many companies value information costs differently, many companies value their labor and overhead costs differently. However, every customer that I have spoken with wants to maximize their returns in the short run and long term.

How do your determine the value of the returns your storage infrastructure provides your company?

Have a great weekend!

Strategy and Tactics- in a changing world
“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

In order to maximize your Storage investments you need to have a stable platform from which to view your infrastructure. Because without a stable point, your can’t apply any long term value to the assets or assign a cost model to the usage of the asset. So to paraphrase De tocqueville, in the storage industry it seems that we have a cadre of managers who regard change as a natural state and who thrive on it.

However, the TCO models that the manufacturer’s in the industry provide are flawed and the make some pretty strange assumptions about cost and performance. Jon Toigo’s Blog points out a serious difference between the performance claims of NetApp and one a customer recently published on the toasters mailing list.

Is it possible to create a reliable cost and performance model when actual customer results are 50% below what the manufacturer claims? It is this disconnect which explains the tremendous growth of our business over the last couple of years. As customers see that their older equipment is stable, reliable and under utilized they seek not to purchase the superseding model of equipment pushed by the manufacturer, but instead they seek to maximize their storage equipment’s unused ability to handle more storage and to reduce their cost per TB of storage they manage.

Zerowait provides our growing list of customers with a cost effective way to manage their storage. And we can provide you with the tools to evaluate your storage infrastructure to see if upgrading your current storage is a better solution then purchasing a superseding unit.

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The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road. –James Thurber

When you are looking to upgrade your storage infrastructure, how do you prioritize your requirements? Most storage customers look at solving today’s problems primarily and then they look to see if they have enough additional storage to handle their expected growth for the next year. They have a given budget which they use to solve this years problems.

The majority of Zerowait’s customers are however looking to maximize the storage capacity and utilization of their current storage assets. Our typical customer has purchased a piece of NetApp equipment that is still underutilized and is looking to maximize his return on storage investment. They do this by upgrading their storage to maximize their storage density, or by purchasing equipment that has legally transferable licenses and meets their performance and storage requirements. Very few of the NetApp 700 Series and 800 series customers we talk to on a daily basis have maximized their units processing and storage capacity. They wonder why they need to upgrade their units to a 900 series or a 3000 series unit.They know they don’t and call us for help in controlling their storage and upgrade costs.

Going to www.spec.org and researching the published NetApp performance documents can help you understand the overall performance specs of newer units against older units. But you have to apply costs to these units to get a real value for your cost of storage. Zerowait can help you do your analysis by providing you current cost data for our stocked units of Licensed filers with NFS, CIFS, Snap mirror and Cluster.

Cost comparisons between storage expansion and storage replacement need to be based on clearly defined goals within your organization. Purchasing new equipment will not guarantee the best cost of storage and performance ratios for your requirements.

“Market research can establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that the egg is a sorry product and that it obviously will not continue to sell. Because, after all, eggs won’t stand up by themselves, they roll too easily, are too easily broken, require special packaging, look alike, are difficult to open, won’t stack on the shelf.”

Robert Pliskin – quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations

I was speaking to a new customer the other day in Maryland about how Zerowait became the largest third party service and support company specifically focusing on NetApp products. I explained our history and how much my staff and I were impressed with NetApp’s products in the 1990’s. I reviewed how a NetApp salesman named Tom Morris taught us about the products, and how we met with Dave Hitz at their old buildings on San Tomas. I discussed how the filers worked within our High Availability architectures. I went into our work with Amit Pandey and how we put out a joint press release with NetApp & Radware. I told him about our trips with the folks from Dupont and Legg Mason into NetApp’s new customer center on Java Drive so they could see how NetApp products worked and meet with their folks. I explained how Zerowait sent our engineers to training at NetApp, and how their sales and marketing folks used to come to our customer events and work with us in our trade show booths at trade shows in Las Vegas.

I explained how we were introduced to NetApp’s Registered Service Provider program at a NetApp Conference in San Francisco, and how we became one of the first RSP’s supporting companies like Computer Science Corporation (CSC). I explained that we sold filers to the Jet Propulsion Lab, and Interliant, TTSG and so many others. And the customer asked me what happened to what sounds like a great working relationship. And I had to answer that we still don’t know why NetApp canceled our relationship, but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Zerowait.

What we found while being NetApp resellers was that there are lot of companies that were very unhappy with the high cost of NetApp’s support and service policies. However, as a NetApp reseller we were not allowed to sell used or compatible equipment to NetApp customers. But when our contract was canceled, we were free to provide third party support to those disaffected customers. So, we developed a niche market and have grown the business very successfully.

Once the Eggshell was broken we saw a beautiful opportunity as the egg spilled out in front of us. Out of adversity, we developed a growing business that is dedicated to providing High Availability service and support for NetApp’s products at reasonable prices. Because we are no longer tied to NetApp we can provide unbiased answers to our customers who are looking for solutions to their most vexing technical and budgetary problems related to NetApp hardware.

“Too many people miss the silver lining because they’re expecting gold.” — Maurice Setter

At a breakfast the other day with a customer of ours we were discussing how unbelievably reliable NetApp equipment is. We have customers running versions 5.X in Unix environments that have not done anything to their equipment for 4 or 5 years. I explained that the reliability is what attracted us to work with NetApp in the late 1990’s because our vision was to provide our customers with High Availability solutions. Many of the units that Zerowait sold while Zerowait was a NetApp Reseller and Registered Service Provider are still in operation today . For most of our customers, there is a need for Reliability, Availability , Scalability and Predictability. And we take each of these words very seriously.

Reliability – To Zerowait reliability means that the services and equipment that we provide will provide our customers with the highest levels of support and uptime possible. We do this by running all of the equipment we support in our own facilities and we keep our own production environment running on systems like we support for our customers.

Availability – High Availability is not just a phrase, it means that Zerowait will support the products our company sells, as long as we can get the parts for the equipment. It is our commitment to providing reasonably priced support for legacy products that keeps us in business.

Scalability – The reason Zerowait wanted to work with NetApp in the 1990’s was that we realized that our customers were deploying products quickly and needed an easy and reliable solution for their databases. NetApp’s products were very easy to upgrade and they remain so. providing affordable storage upgrades to NetApp customers remains one of our most satisfying business sectors. Zerowait helps customers increase storage capacity while staying within their budget everyday.

Predictability – Zerowait has been in business since 1989, and we plan to be here for many more years, no matter what happens to the manufacturers’ products we support. We just updated a big multinational chemical companies F840 service and support contract for three years. So we will be here for a while yet!

Our commitment to providing High Availability equipment and support to our customers has remained consistent throughout our history, no matter what the latest industry ‘Gold Rush’ was. And our commitment to our customers is the Sliver lining of partnering with Zerowait for your NetApp storage . Our customers recognize that they can depend on Zerowait to provide them with affordable service, support and upgrades for NetApp storage equipment. And our competitors know it also.

It’s cheaper to save fuel than to burn it.–Amory Lovins, energy expert

Yesterday, while driving to work, I was listening to the radio and heard a commentary on the price of gas. I wondered if anyone ever calculated how much it costs to run a data center with a hundred TB of data running on systems that are 25% efficient.

I wonder how much of a dent in our energy bills we could save by increasing the capacity utilization of computer storage resources? I am not just talking about the efficiency of the equipment, I am also interested in seeing if there is any interest in getting storage resources up to perhaps 50% efficiency. That does not seem like much. Imagine how much energy could be saved if fewer disks were spinning with more data on them.

Tom West writes…

Hello Mike,

Along with rising oil/gasoline prices, the return of rolling blackouts in California and Intel's latest talk of "low-power chips" suggest a renewed interest in energy efficiency.  You raise an interesting question about cost savings related to increasing the capacity utilization of disk storage.

Of course, one concern in turn is the impact that consolidation can potentially have upon performance (e.g., resource contention).  In any case, I'm certainly an advocate for better efficiency in disk capacity utilization (and rising energy costs might well draw the attention of folks to this issue).  It seems that having some empirical metrics in this regard would be a big help in evaluating the various tradeoffs involved.

Regards, Tom

Tom West
hyperI/O LLC.
www.hyperIO.com

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact. Warren Buffett

We often speak in this blog, and with our customers, about how to overcome past decisions within an organization’s storage infrastructure. It is not always the most efficient thing to simply upgrade your storage, because your storage might be an under utilized utility now. But how can you tell? That is where Warren Buffett’s insight is so applicable to the storage industry. Management needs to know where to go to find the answers to the questions of capacity planning and capacity utilization and figure out how to measure the efficiency of the organization’s storage infrastructure.

How do you measure your storage efficiency?
How do you measure your storage usage?
How do you forecast your storage growth?
How much does it cost to run disks and infrastructure with out data on it?
How much does it cost to run disks and Infrastructure which is only 25% efficient?

Zerowait can help you come up with answers to these questions. Give us a call if you would like to know how.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Earlier this week I was speaking to a savvy NetApp customer about a service and support quote for their planned infrastructure upgrade. The customer wanted to know why more people don’t know about the transferable license issue, and the ability to get NetApp filers with transferable licenses. I explained that the issue had been addressed by NetApp’s founder and CEO a number of times within the toasters mailing list and that there are plenty of customers that are using filers with transferable licenses.

Many NetApp Resellers know about the transferable license issue also, and we have sold to many of them. At least One Platinum reseller of NetApp’s products hits this blog regularly and therefore understands that transferable licenses are available, since we touch on the subject regularly.

But essentially, if you are looking to save money on your storage infrastructure then purchasing units with transferable licenses is an easy way to do it. Zerowait currently has a large stock of NetApp filers with transferable licenses including FAS940’s, F840’s, F825’s, F820’s and R100’s. All of these units are available now, please give us a call if you are interested in these filers.