Zerowait Corporation

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.

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.