Zerowait Corporation

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we now know that it is bad economics. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

When it comes to your storage infrastructure do you feel that your vendors are giving you a square deal? In the long run computer storage technology should find a level pricing structure. However, we live in the here and now, and many enterprise storage consumers feel that they are not getting their money’s worth from their storage technology vendors. How do you value your storage infrastructure? Is a simple ROI model enough? Is it important that it costs just as much money to spin disks with very little data on them as it does to spin disks that are full? Does it make a difference that your company may be keeping documents that are never going to be accessed again on your most expensive storage platforms? How are storage decisions made in your company?

How do you determine Storage Capacity Efficiency, when it is very hard to get clear capacity numbers from your storage vendors? How do you determine Storage Capacity Utilization, when it is very hard to define your operational and manpower costs per TB of storage.

Determining your actual storage costs can be a daunting task. However your storage costs can represent 40% of your IT budget. Therefore, it seems that getting these costs under control is a very important. Zerowait is working on creating a methodology for evaluating the economics of storage, and we will be putting together a small conference on storage economics in the next few weeks. Give us a call if you would like to be included in the conference.

“Right or wrong, the customer is always right.” Marshall Field

The response to our study of the performance of the NetApp 940 compared to the FAS3020 has been enlightening. But it may be that NetApp’s customers are asking the same price / performance questions that we did in our study. Because, NetApp’s executives are noticing thatit is harder to sell the new units.

NetApp chief executive Dan Warmenhoven said the company’s FAS300 series of storage appliances launched in May was the victim of a long sales cycle.

Potential customers required an unusually long evaluation period to compare the new products to similar systems from NetApp and competitors, he said.

Often upgrading an existing system makes more budgetary sense than purchasing a new system. If you are looking to increase your storage without breaking you budget please give Zerowait a call at 888.811.0808.

“The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent.”
— Mark Twain

Typically the founder / VP of a public company and the CEO of the same company follow the same playbook and sing the same tune. However, NetApp’s team seems to be in diagreement on the route or the course of NetApp as evidenced by their statements which are below.
Hitz 03/2005 “We’re small enough that we can double our revenues in storage and remain a focused vendor. We’re not interested at all in going EMC’s route.”

Warmenhoven 08/2005 “This is increasingly becoming a two-horse race,” Warmenhoven said of the midrange storage landscape. “We’re becoming an alternative to EMC. The mix has shifted from file server NAS to Fibre Channel across the board, and we’re taking it to them. We’re the only two vendors that offer the complete array of low end to high end, primary and secondary storage, SAN and NAS. We’re competing across the board.”

We are confused by their statements , how can NetApp be not interested in going EMC’s route and yet be part of a two horse race? Don’t horse races usually take place on the same course? If you are confused by NetApp’s statements you are not alone. However, you can be certain that Zerowait remains focused on providing our growing family of satisfied customers with affordable parts, service and support for their NetApp equipment.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. —Dale Carnegie

Since we started writing this blog several months ago we have gained lots of new friends, a lot of people write us to ask questions about how to improve their return on their storage investments and how to extend the life cycle of their equipment. Because Zerowait focuses on NetApp upgrades, parts and service most of our readers are end users of these products, but about ten percent of our readers are from NetApp and their resellers. We are honored that these folks find our blog interesting and we encourage them to participate in our discussion. Having input from the Manufacturer and their resellers would certainly provide perspective to our readers, and could answer a lot of the questions we have posed over the past few months.

The staff at Zerowait and our blog readers are very interested in maximizing the price performance ratio, return on investment, and product life cycle of NetApp products.

Thanks for following our discussions.

Storage is a puzzle with so many facets that getting the correct answer is not easy. Consider the list of options that must be decided before a purchase decision is made in the storage arena:

1) Capacity to purchase.
2) Forecasted storage growth over the year.
3) Speed of retrieval for users.
4) Lost files recovery options and speed.
5) Cost at purchase time.
6) Continuing cost of operation for system.
7) Continuing cost of maintenance for software and hardware.
8) Cost of staff trained to use and maintain storage systems.
9) Projected cost of replacement parts, after company supersedes equipment.
10) Availability of maintenance parts for 3, 5 and 7 years.

Creating an algorithm to manage these fixed and variable costs is rather difficult for the average IT organization. And there are many other parts to the equation. IT departments are not trained in the economics and book keeping aspects of the business they serve. However, viewing storage from a hardware performance perspective only is myopic and does not provide the business with the real cost of storage. For Example, if an inventory item was sitting on the shelf for two or three years without being used, the accounting department would have a cost for the unused inventory. And perhaps right down the asset. However, if a company has an unused inventory of computer storage the only costs associated with it are the costs of power to run the underutilized storage . Sooner or later companies are going to have to recognize unused storage inventory as a cost to the business.

I had dinner with an economist in Boston this week and he has tried to make economical storage decisions, but has been stymied by documentation and other headaches in creating an economical storage solution for his company. His thoughts and problems are here.

It is an interesting article, and I think you will enjoy it.

Creating an algorithm

“I have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there.”
— Fred Allen
I was up in Boston and Cambridge yesterday and today visiting some of our customers. I am always confused by the road signs and the compass directions on them. There seems to be no logic to the road signage in Boston. So this time I brought my portable GPS with me and my Yahoo maps. I still had to call to get correct directions.

In some towns I visit, the customers joke about the weather, but in Boston it is always fun to talk about the roads. But unlike Fred Allen, I had a great time visiting our customers and going to some great restaurants. Most of the customers I met with were looking to upgrade their NetApp units without breaking their IT budgets, and universally they complained about NetApp hardware support prices. They really like our service and support policies and our prices.

It is always great to meet happy customers, especially when they recommend us to other folks!

What I just said is the fundamental, end-all, final, not-subject-to-opinion absolute truth, depending on where you’re standing.”
— Steve Martin

I suggest to all of our regular readers that you read this Blog Entry by Jon Toigo it raises some interesting issues .

Save money with our suggestions for purchasing from NetApp

Rule 1: What Is your Need? – Clearly Identify your requirements & timeline. Don’t be afraid to tell the salesperson you are considering your options. Go to www.spec.org and www.zerowait.com to review the specs on NetApp systems. Compare older systems to newer ones. Clearly identify which performance parameters are most important to you. Give Zerowait a call, we can help you define your requirements.

Rule 2: Never meet a salesman alone – Invite the salesman into your office conference area. Do more listening than talking. Tell him the parameters of your requirements and request fair comparisons between the NetApp equipment and their competitors.

Rule 3: Remain calm use, your poker face – Your negotiating position weakens and the salesman gets more aggressive if you give them the impression that they have the perfect solution for you.

Rule 4: Avoid your Data Center – Don’t let the salesman into your data center. Salespeople don’t need to see your Network and Storage infrastructure.

Rule 5: Ignore the first price quote – Your final invoice is directly affected by the initial price quote you receive from NetApp. NetApp has a very flexible list price. Lower volume customers pay a lot higher price then volume customers. Remember that in most cases, NetApp’s sales people are on salary and commission. Commission salespeople make their money based on the total invoice. The larger the invoice, the more they bring home. Your job is to get the invoice as low as possible. A price list you can use as a reference is here

Rule 6: Don’t be afraid to shop around – Do some research on the Web, There are four sources for NetApp’s new equipment now. NetApp direct, NetApp resellers, IBM direct, IBM resellers. They have identical products, service and support. Get multiple prices, when the salesperson comes back with a counter offer or says they can’t go any lower, tell him thank you and you will get the product elsewhere. Remember, there are plenty of options for your storage solution.

Rule 7: Require Transferable licenses – If they tell you they are not available tell them you can get proof that they are, Zerowait can help you with this.

Rule 9. Require a 60-day trial – Surprisingly, many companies never test a solution prior to buying it. Don’t make a mistake; test the system completely in your network prior to making a purchase order for the equipment.

Rule 10: End of Period –NetApp needs to make quarterly sales numbers or their stock may go down, don’t place orders until the end of NetApp’s fiscal quarter or end of their fiscal year to get the best deals.

“Facts are stubborn things.”
— John Adams

A reader asked me to make a list of ten rules of storage management which he could run his enterprise on, without breaking his budget or running out of storage. A sort of Generally Acceptable Storage Principles, that correlates to the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Perhaps we should start a group called GASP 🙂 .

Rule 1) Never run out of storage – Running out of storage will stop your business.
Rule 2) Storage is king – Your business requires access to its data storage assets to remain in business. Without your data, you are out of business.
Rule 3) Know your available storage now! – How much actual, tangible, available storage do you have now.
Rule 4) What is your storage balance? – Was there any change in your daily storage balance of available storage, and storage reserves. Why?
Rule 5) You can’t manage storage on a monthly basis – Available storage is used daily with unpredictable spikes and valleys. A monthly synopsis may tell you that you are running out of storage too late to react and head off a storage shortage that negatively impacts your business
Rule 6) Forecast your Storage – what is your forecast growth for the next 6 months, can your available storage inventory last that long
Rule 7) Storage problems don’t just happen – There will always be leading indicators prior to a storage failure, or available storage shortage . Learn the signs.
Rule 8) Unused storage has a cost – Unused storage inventory costs money to maintain. Empty disks cost money to purchase and keep spinning. What is your unused storage holding cost?
Rule 9) Know the Internal Rate of Return for your storage -Any underutilized business equipment has a carrying cost. Service, support and upgrades for under utilized storage is wasteful.
Rule 10) Maintain good relations with your storage customers – Alienating your storage users will create storage backwaters and raise the overall cost of storage.

George Bernard Shaw
“Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.”

Mike Linett ( 2005)
“Zerowait has the tools, staff and inventory to solve your storage problems.”

Recently, we’ve gotten a lot of calls and emails about our analysis of NetApps FAS3020 as compared with some of the systems it superseded.

One of our customers sent us this quote by a NetApp VP in reference to the new FAS3020 systems “The emphasis is on redefining the price performance,” said Suresh Vasudevan, senior vice president of products at Network Appliance. “The main attributes of the new platform supports four times the capacity and has two times the price performance.”

How did they come up with these numbers? We can’t find any validation in the www.Spec.org tests. Our review of the Spec.org tests seems to show only a meager improvement in performance over their older systems. So, how does NetApp come up with their price performance figures?

Today’s storage devices eat up about 40% of most companies IT budgets, According to industry studies these devices are only 25% efficient Most companies would consider them to have a terrible Internal Rate of Return if they were a piece of production equipment at a manufacturing facility.

Zerowait specializes in providing our customers a much better return on their IT investment dollars. If you are wondering about your actual cost of ownership and maintenance per TB of Storage – Give us a call! We can help you raise your storage efficiency!