Zerowait Corporation

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!

Perhaps the reason that NetApp’s sales slumped last quarter may be because NetApp’s consumers took a look at the performance numbers of NetApp’s new units and saw that there is not much of a reason to purchase a new unit? Zerowait recently reviewed NetApp’s published performance numbers on their new FAS3020 and found that there was not much reason to buy a new unit as compared to buying additional storage for an older unit. I can tell you that our sales of add on storage for NetApp systems has been very strong lately.

According to NetApp’s CEO, ‘Warmenhoven says customers took longer to evaluate NetApp systems last quarter following the rollout of new FAS3000 Fibre Channel-plus-SATA systems”
Warmenhoven deos not mention that there are now four sales channels – NetApp Direct, NetApp Resellers, IBM Direct and IBM resellers – all selling the same unit. So savvy customers will shop around for the lowest price. Customers know that price is the only differentiator, all of the service and support is identical. As every salesman knows, it is very hard to differentiate added value for the identical product , service and support.

Perhaps NetApp is so aggressively purchasing other companies because they realize that the profits in storage are going to decline as it continues its trend toward commoditization. I certainly wish they could clearly define a 3 to 5 year corporate strategy, because our customers are trying to optimize their storage purchases based on a consistent vision from their storage providers.

No matter which side the pendulum swings toward within NetApp, our customers can depend on Zerowait to provide affordable service, support and upgrades for their legacy NetApp equipment.

What is on your Radar?

Most of our customers are looking at Capacity Utilization & extended ROI on equipment. It does not seem to matter if the customer is a small company or a Fortune 100 company, they want a better ROI picture at purchase and throughout the product lifecycle. However, most of the storage vendors are trying to sell our customers new systems with higher capacity or trying to switch the pardigm on them and bundling options they don’t need into their storage solutions.

What is on your Storage Vendors’ Radar?
It seems that most storage vendors are concerned with Storage Security by the press reports we see and the corporate merger activity. Here is a sample from Byte and switch

Byte and Switch News Analysis: EMC Casts Wider Net AUGUST 04, 2005 – Plans to get into net resource management and burrow deeper into security

Byte and Switch Newsfeed: Permabit, NorthSeas Form Archive Pact AUGUST 02, 2005 – Partnership combines NorthSeas’ Guard E/N (pronounced Guardian) with Permabit’s Permeon Compliance Store for simplified email archiving

Byte and Switch News Analysis: VCs Add $15M More to Data Domain AUGUST 01, 2005 – Expects latest haul to take it to profitability but must navigate maze of competitors

Byte and Switch Newsfeed: Unitrends Supports Evaults AUGUST 01, 2005 – Unitrends announces its line of Data Protection Unit network storage appliances now offer companies the ability to electronically vault data from or to offsite locations

What is on Zerowait’s Radar?
Zerowait is focusing on providing our customers with affordable service, support and upgrades for their Storage infrastructure. After all, it is what our customers want most of all.

Is NetApp’s FAS3020 faster than their old FAS940, what about the F840? Pursuant to a customer request I went to www.Spec.org to check the results of their testing to see if I could provide our customer the best unit for his budget and performance requirements.

Their testing results are very revealing, and if you look carefully at their testing
parameters, it seems that the 3020 was given a lot of advantages in the testing. The new FAS3020 compared to the FAS940, has over a 40% faster processor and twice the NVRAM, it was tested on a Jumbo Frame network and they increased the RAID set size. More drives typically represents better performance for a database. However, even with all of these advantages the 3020 was only able to handle about 3% more OPS. But it seems to have a lower overall response rate for handling the requests. When comparing the 3020 to the 840 we were even more startled, because the 3020 has 4 times the NVRAM and 4 times the processor speed but only doubles the OPS and the response was only about 20% better.

From our review of the results of NetApp’s Spec.org tests we recommended that our customer purchase the F840 or FAS940 with transferable licenses from Zerowait, because they can save a lot of money without sacrificing performance. Our customers are concerned by the cost of storage at acquisition and also the long term maintenance costs of their equipment. At Zerowait we strive to provide our customers with outstanding storage value for their investment dollars. And carefully reviewing these tests results can save you money also.

“The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you’re willing to pay the price.”
— Vince Lombardi

Over the many years in this business I have tried to simplify the price/ performance ratio down to a simple graph. However, I have often been stymied by the problem that our customers value their labor resources and overhead costs much differently.

When you combine costing issues with the fact that companies like NetApp quadruple processor speeds and quintuple NVRAM but don’t even double their OPS when they come out with a new model, it makes it hard to do comparisons. Is it cost effective to run new equipment at 20% efficiency or 3 year old equipment at 50% efficiency? According to industry statistics most storage equipment runs at below 25% efficiency. And what is the real storage value of a hard disk and the right sized value. For instance a NetApp 144GB disk usually reads as 136GB, so you lose almost 10% of your disk space right off the bat. So what are you buying in usable space when you purchase a disk system from NetApp or EMC. Is it just a guess?

The tests we see mentioned and the white papers don’t seem verifiable or repeatable in any environment other than the specific test environment. And it often seems that the test systems are optimized .

So it all comes down to hard work to produce a verifiable solution to the storage hardware questions of :
1) How much does it cost to run my old storage compared with a new solution
2) Will a new storage solution provide more storage at a lower cost per TB?
3) Will Replacing my current storage solution cost me less per terrabyte to administer?
4) Is it more cost effective to add storage to my older system or buy a new system?

Zerowait is working on a way to provide our customers answers to these questions.