Zerowait Corporation

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.

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 .