Zerowait Corporation

Benjamin Franklin
“Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.”

Mike Linett (2005)
“Zerowait can help keep your ship afloat!”

Last week a large midwestern company called us up, because their NetApp hardware support was getting to be a real cost concern. They have a large NetApp installed base and their management was looking for ways to cut operational costs. I spoke to them for quite a while and they sent us their Weekly Logs so we could get an inventory of their systems. Once we reviewed their logs we created a quote and sent it off to them.
The next day I called them up to make certain that they had received our quote and ask if they had any further questions that I could answer.

Looks like Zerowait gained another customer !

As regular readers of our blog know, the more customers we get, the lower our price to each customer can be. Zerowait can reduce your price of NetApp hardware support substantially. Give us a call, we would love to hear from you!

Stop, Don’t do it ! Don’t give up! Zerowait provides affordable NetApp hardware support
A new customer called us up yesterday, he was very upset by the NetApp support quote he had received. He was wondering if it made any sense to continue using NetApp equipment since it is so expensive to continue with their hardware support. He had been reading this blog, and decided that maybe it was time to call Zerowait for a competitive hardware support quote. When he spoke to me he told me that he was thinking of giving up the features he loved about a NetApp filer because the costs of maintenance from NetApp made the equipment too costly.

He sent us his configuration information and we reviewed it and gave him back a quote in about 90 minutes. He called me up a little while later to check to see if our price was correct. We quoted far less then NetApp had for NBD parts replacement and support. He told me that because of our quote he would keep his NetApp equipment.

The Zerowait family of customers grows larger every week. Because our customers know that we provide affordable parts, outstanding service and knowledgeable support for their High Availability storage infrastructures.

Purchasing storage shouldn’t require poker skills.

As many regular readers know we have been helping a NetApp customer negotiate his way through the NetApp Software support poker game. NetApp initially quoted him over $74,000.00 for his software support and the customer called us to help him make sense of the quote. We told the customer that typically NetApp charges about $5200.00 a year for ongoing software support for a F760. We have seen NetApp try this Bluff before, the idea is to raise the price of the support for an older system to incentivize the customer to buy a new system. But in this case the customer called their Bluff. After a few days the customer called back NetApp and he told them that his current storage architecture perfectly met his needs and he did not see any reason to upgrade. Either they could take his offer for one year of support or he would pick up his chips and leave the table. They caved in, met his price point, and walked away with their tail between their legs.

Many customers call us when they are playing poker with their NetApp sales people, one tactic that we have seen from a Canadian customer’s quote is for NetApp to include Snap Mirror on their quote for a single system. We have never seen a Snap mirror licensed box mirror to itself so this seems to be another tactic to pad the quote, to the unsuspecting customer. This customer called Zerowait and we explained to him how to play poker with NetApp.

Working with NetApp on a new purchase requires that you negotiate everything and clearly write down your terms on your purchase order. Zerowait can teach you the poker skills you need when it comes time to meet your salesman at the Poker table. Remember it is your money and critical data that you are gambling with. If you need some tips, give us a call!

Commitment to reaching your Storage and budget goals

It takes teamwork to achieve the goals of high availability storage and long term return on investment. Yesterday a BIG Government Agency called us because NetApp has stopped supporting their equipment. No parts Available from NetApp for his F630. When faced with the alternatives of vendor mandated upgrades and reducing his costs per terrabyte of high availability storage, this IT decision maker needed a trusted ally. Zerowait works with you to get your money’s worth from your NetApp investment. We stock the parts, we fight on your side.

As the largest third party service and support organization focusing on NetApp equipment we are stunned when we read statements like this from NetApp employees …
Joel Reich, senior director of product marketing at NetApp, said bundled SANs are being sold more for ease of configuration than for cost-cutting. “We’re not in the camp of trying to find out ways to knock pennies out of the cost of Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel will never get to the cost of Ethernet,” he says.

Shouldn’t NetApp be working on ways to reduce your costs of storage management? If they were able to reduce the costs of managing your storage infrastructure, you would be able to invest in staff instead of buying overpriced software licenses and hardware support agreements. Zerowait is fighting for you every day to reduce your costs of NetApp service , support and upgrades.

Substance over Style

As a child I used to watch Speed Racer, and I loved the simple story lines, good always triumphed over evil. And Speed always won every race by figuring something or other out just in the nick of time.

Business success is based on a repeatably successful system and a team dedicated to building that success strategy. Speed racer and his team worked things out together and there are a lot of good business lessons to be learned in that cartoon series! Business reputations can be ruined by creating an image that can’t be sustained under real life situations. Asking your team, or your vendors, to create a series of one off solutions can end up costing your company a lot more than money, it may create a system which is not repeatable, and therefore risks your data recovery.

Current events show that many companies can’t securely transport their tape backups and when they can’t, they are unable to quickly and accurately restore their data for their critical business functions.

Statically these occurrences may be insignificant, but the fear of losing critical business data weighs on the conscience of every business person. If data integrity is important to your business, then data loss is not an option. Zerowait can help you create a successful storage strategy that includes the methods and tools required to manage your critical business data. And our solutions can help you quickly test and improve your data integrity statistics.

Disaster Recovery or Disaster prevention!

Over the weekend we watched as another Hurricane hit Florida. It brought to mind the problems of backup strategy and business recovery. At Zerowait, we reviewed our backup strategy and decided to implement a Disaster Prevention Strategy. For us it was easier to create a secondary site which we could mirror data to then it would be to create a complete emergency Disaster recovery solution. The benefits of our system are easy to quantify. We can test by simply switching our DNS to point to our other data center. When we need to do maintenance in our Newark Data Center we simply cut over to the Wilmington Data Center at the beginning of a work day, there is no interruption in our business tasks, and our engineers can do their maintenance without causing business problems.

Some our customers, have expressed interest in our strategy and Zerowait’s engineering staff is helping them create a similar Disaster Prevention Strategy using transferable licensed NetApp filers. This helps them save money while increasing their data integrity. We are now working with some customers on implementing their Disaster Prevention strategies using our two data centers, because our customers know they can depend on Zerowait to provide them with affordable NetApp solutions for their critical data storage requirements.

NetApp customer outraged by bizare Software support quote from NetApp!

On Thursday , we received a quote by fax from a NetApp F760 customer who received a quote for over $74,000.00 for his ongong software subscription. He called us to discuss this hilarious quote. He was laughing , but he was astonished and quite aggrevated also. How could they charge this much for a subscription for a software package? If I did not see the Quote with my own eyes I would not believe it.

Perhaps NetApp needs to make money on the backend because they have been giving too much away to gain maket share Dave Hitz, cofounder and head of engineering at NetApp. “We have a single software system, and we can cut our prices to gain market share,” he says.

I don’t know of any customer that likes to be bullied by their vendor, and this latest pricing tactic seems to be a way for NetApp to either force customers to upgrade their perfectly good storage systems or to pad NetApp’s profits. The uninteded consequence of this pricing structure will be to drive customers away from NetApp products, because the ROI of their products just skyrocketed.

If you are looking for a way to keep your NetApp costs under control please keep Zerowait in mind. Our satisfied family of customers continues to grow because Zerowait provides an affordable alternative to NetApp’s outrageous service, support and upgrade pricing.

Is Elmer Fudd in sales?
On Wednesday , we received a phone call from a NetApp customer, that had been told by his sales representative, that he should always purchase two or three times the storage he needs, just to be safe. He called us to see what our take of the situation was. I asked how the determination was made that he needed more storage? Did anyone review his storage capacity and usage profile? What were his storage growth projections? There are many reasons to ask these basic questions but they come down to one really good reason. Since storage goes down in price relative to capacity over time, it makes financial sense to buy the least amount of storage you will need at the time of purchase. History has clearly taught us that adding storage capacity will be cheaper in the future.

When a company calls us to do a storage evaluation we typically run some of our scripts to get an idea of each of the following areas:
1) What is the usable storage on the filer.
2) What is the total capacity of the filer
3) What is the Snap Reserve on the filer
4) What is the percentage of used space by file extension.
5) What is the age profile of the files.

Within few minutes we can tell what the access profile of the filer is and quickly help our customer create a storage plan that makes budgetary sense. Most of the time, our customers find that simply adding some Zerowait storage shelves and disks and reorganizing their current storage configuration is all that is needed. But whether our customer needs our help in configuring their storage, migrating data or adding capacity, they know they can trust Zerowait to provide the best service and support available for NetApp equipment.

Safely Purchasing Second-Hand Storage Gear

A few customers of ours called us or sent us links over over the last few days to point out this article which features Zerowait. I like the article a lot! The article goes into the proper way to purchase used and remanufactured equipment and what to watch out for.

The article also has some bullet points that refer to studies that say that many customers are looking for a ROI on their storage gear in the 5 to 7 year range, but as I have pointed out previously, NetApp; like so many other manufacturers, focuses on a refresh cycle of 3 years. This is the disconnect that enables Zerowait to grow. Zerowait focuses on providing affordable ongoing service and support for systems beyond the 3 year window, which are still reliably serving data.

Transferable licenses

Over the holiday weekend we received several emails requesting quotes on our systems with transferable licenses. When sending us a request please try to include the shelf type you want and the LRC or ESH combination for the shelves. Also, please include your preference for drives and any additional Network Cards you require over the standard configuration. Without this information we have to call you back so we can prepare an accurate quote for you. If you have your NetApp quote you can send that to us via FAX at 302 738 4302, and then we can create a competitive quote based on the items in that quote.

We have transferable licensed systems in stock with NFS, CIFS, Cluster and Snapmirror. We can save customers thousands of dollars for the same license codes that NetApp will sell you. Ten thousand dollars saved is a ten thousand dollars earned!