Zerowait Corporation

The weekend is upon us! Here in the U.S. it is a holiday weekend, I don’t know where you are, but we are expecting a very nice weekend, not too hot and not too cold with plenty of sunshine. A good weekend for me to complete some airport projects that I have been putting off all winter long.

Now I know not all of us have weekends off, especially in IT departments. Weekends and late nights are often the only time available to schedule downtime for network changes or fixes. So, like most projects, everything goes much better when you take the time for quality preparation and planning. I know I have told you before that an important part of any pre-planning should be a call to the Zerowait engineers for tips, advice, and to warn them that you may need emergency help incase things go wrong. What I haven’t talked about before is that the Zerowait website has links to technical data and white papers which may have information you need. They can be found in the Technical library section of the Zerowait website.

This information won’t take the place of the extensive, quality experience that the Zerowait engineers have, but it is useful information. So if you are planning some changes or just need some light lunchtime reading, make sure you check out the Technical library. You will probably find something you never knew, but I’ll never tell.

We are celebrating Memorial Day this weekend, this is when we take time out of our busy schedule to honor the brave men and women who have given their time, and far too often, their lives, to fight for our freedom. You may not be in the U.S., but I invite you all to take a moment or two to thank all of those, past and present, who have made the personal sacrifice to fight for their country and the world so that we may all enjoy the freedoms that we have!

Have a great weekend!

The phones at Zerowait have been ringing off the hook about transferable licenses for NetApp filers. Ever since Jon Toigo and Mike Linett posted blogs about transferable licenses, people want to know what the real answer is. Many people believe the propaganda that there is no such thing as a NetApp transferable license. If all they read is information put out by NetApp, I understand why.

The question has been out there for a long time, and the customer wants to be able to buy and sell used equipment. It is a way to help balance the IT equipment budget. When pressed about the issue, Leonard Iventosch told Jon Toigo, as NetApp officials always do, it is “an idea worth exploring.” How long should they have to explore it? The question has been out there for years!

In 2003, when the subject came up, Dan Warmenhoven , NetApp’s Chief Executive Officer, was quick to point to this statement from NetApp’s website, “All Network Appliance software license terms and conditions specify a “license to use,” therefore software cannot legally transfer from one owner to another. Anyone purchasing used hardware equipment must also purchase new software licenses directly either from Network Appliance or from an authorized Network Appliance reseller. Software includes all protocols as well as streaming licenses, Snap products, and other software. Anyone trying to sell you “used software” would be violating the terms of the license. Support contracts such as warranty and maintenance agreements are also non-transferable.” This has been their official word since the beginning of NetApp, but I know it is not the case.

OK, you can buy their “Brooklyn Bridge”, or you can call Zerowait and find out how you can buy USED FILERS with LEGALLY TRANSFERABLE LICENSES. If you buy a filer from Zerowait with a transferable license, Zerowait will handle the transfer of the license, through NetApp, for you.
Why be shocked by the high price of a new system, when you can be pleasantly surprised that you can legally own and operate used NetApp for much less!

Transferable licenses – Yes, Zerowait has them – CIFS, NFS, Cluster & Snapmirror!

I am asked this question daily, but because of Jon Toigo’s article in searchstorage we have gotten a flurry of calls today. NetApp does provide transferable licenses. You just have to negotiate it into your Purchase Order when you buy new equipment.

By the way, Dave Hitz was reviewing the issue two years ago.

From: Dave Hitz (hitz@netapp.com)
Date: Tue May 06 2003 – 12:50:50 EDT
I don’t know how our license database works, but it seems to me that even if we don’t know all the add-on licenses that have been purchased,… . I’m sure there are legal andoperational issues, so no promises, but if other companies have figured this out, it seems like we ought to be able to.

Dave Hitz
EVP Engineering and Co-Founder
Network Appliance

By the way, IBM figured it out years ago.

“Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

Caveat vendor
May 19th 2005 | NEW YORK
>From The Economist print edition

A Florida court wallops one of Wall Street’s top investment banks

COULD the headlines get any worse for Morgan Stanley? Already facing an attempt by dissident former managers to unseat its chief executive, on May 16th the investment bank was ordered by a Florida court to pay $604m for defrauding Ronald Perelman, one of America’s smartest and richest investors. Mr Perelman contended that Morgan Stanley had misled him in 1998 when he agreed to accept shares in its client, a second-rate appliance manufacturer named Sunbeam, in exchange for his controlling interest in Coleman, a supplier of camping equipment.

And yes, things could get worse. On May 18th, after no more than a brief deliberation, the jury decided to award Mr Perelman another $850m, this time in punitive damages.

Yet none of this was ever brought before the jury, because of something that turned out to be critical to Morgan Stanley’s defence. It had consistently failed to turn over internal e-mails. As the bank had done in other investigations, it blamed the omissions on computer errors and the like. This time, however, in Mr Perelman it faced an adversary who was implacable, well represented and determined to extract more than a token settlement; past opponents, mainly regulators, have been more easily satisfied.

Worse still for the bank, it faced a judge who found its delays and evasive answers to requests intolerable. “Many of these failings were done knowingly, deliberately and in bad faith,” concluded Judge Maass, in her critical pre-trial ruling. “A reasonable juror could conclude that evidence of Morgan Stanley & Co’s misconduct demonstrates its consciousness of guilt.”

That ruling, and the thought that lots of embarrassing dotcom-era e-mails might come to light, will warm the heart of many a plaintiff lawyer. And an odd twist to the Sunbeam case is worth a moment’s meditation—not for Morgan Stanley specifically, but for the whole financial industry. According to Mr Perelman’s allegations, the company’s problems came to light only because of the demands of its auditor: Arthur Andersen, an accounting firm once renowned for its probity. How easily can reputations crumble to dust.

What can I say that Teddy Roosevelt did not? If Morgan Stanley could read their Emails then they might not have received the fine? Zerowait has transferable licensed NetApp hardware that they could have used to archive their emails for well under $100,000.00 . Currently, Zerowait has Transferable licensed R100’s available with 12 TB for about $58,000.00

Make sure you can read your backups and archives!

There was a new press release posted on CRN yesterday, Updated NetApp Line Supports Mixed Drives. On the surface it sounds very nice, and it could be just what you need. However, I am always one to read between the lines in any press release. There are many questions between these lines. I’ll separate some of the lines and show you what I mean.

Kevin Schoonover, director of engineering at Arrow Electronics, said that NetApp seems to have applied a lot of channel and customer feedback into the new appliances. We would all like to believe that, but a lot of our channel and end users would really like transferable licenses on all NetApp equipment, did they address this? I sure is high on the request list of most of the people I talk to.

Specifically, said Schoonover, NetApp in the past did not allow a mixture of Fibre Channel and SATA drives in an array, a feature that he said is important to the channel.

Why is it important to the channel? Is NetApp going to support drives from third party suppliers now? Why would the channel care? If the drives are still only available through NetApp and its distributors, what is the advantage?

Another key feature of Data ONTAP 7G is the ability to dynamically allocate capacity to storage volumes, Suresh Vasudevan (vice president of products for Netapp) said. Typical storage array capacity utilization is in the 30 percent to 40 percent range, and it is usually necessary to allocate more capacity to specific purposes than needed in order to account for the growth of the data, he said. “Data ONTAP 7G reclaims unused space and doubles the utilization of capacity,” he said. “It’s completely transparent to the user.”

Is the 30% typical of a NetApp filer or overall storage systems? What was their test environment? Did it include desktops or only Enterprise NAS and SAN?

While both Clariion and EVA support mixed Fibre Channel and SATA drives, Vasudevan said NetApp’s new arrays are more suitable for primary storage because of software that offers RAID-DP protection, which allows up to two hard drives to fail without affecting data availability. “The only other way to do this is to mirror the storage, which is too expensive,” he said.

Why is it too expensive to Mirror drives if you just use a simple RAID it is free with most operating systems and ATA drives are cheap. Who says you need to buy an EMC or NetApp system?

OK, I know I’m not supposed to pay this much attention to press release propaganda, but it’s too much fun to read between the lines!

May 23, 2005 08:02 AM US Eastern Timezone

Network Appliance Changes Game for Midrange Enterprise Storage

Consistancy

Almost every one of our customers wants their suppliers to be consistant. In this press release NetApp emphasizes how their new systems change everything.

We designed our new FAS systems, virtualization engines, and SATA disk option to provide the best value of any midrange storage system in the industry,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products and Partners at Network Appliance. “Our customers tell us that data storage consumes 30% to 50% of their IT infrastructure budgets, and that data growth presents a huge management challenge. We listened and designed the modular and scalable FAS3000 series and the V3000 systems to reduce overall complexity, increase performance, and simplify data management. Additionally, we are achieving an industry milestone by enabling economical, high-density SATA disk drives for primary storage applications — without sacrificing data integrity and safety.”

Why would NetApp want to alienate their established customers who want to get the most value out of their current IT infrastructure, especially those that just purchased a 900 series unit? Also, NetApp fails to discuss that savvy data storage managers know that they can buy transferable licensed filers and save a bundle on their storage costs. As a reader of this blog, you already know that Zerowait provides affordable alternatives to NetApp’s pricing policies.

Jon Toigo’s article today Discusses the odd perspective that storage vendors have toward their customers. It is worth a few minutes of your time.

Thomas Mendoza, president of Network Appliance, earned $22 million last year, including the estimated value of his stock options, more than triple the pay for Network Appliance’s CEO. Mendoza also earned more than all but eight Bay Area CEOs.

A customer called us the other day to compliment us on our fast service and then he asked how we knew so much about NetApp’s products. The call was transferred to me and I explained that we were once a very successful NetApp reseller and one of the first Registered Service Providers in NetApp’s program. I explained that in 2000 we were a preferred partner of NetApp, but somehow the reseller relationship disintegrated.

At the same time that our relationship with NetApp was coming to an end our nationwide customer base was calling us and asking us to provide them with affordable NetApp equipment upgrades. As their trusted technology partner, we continue to get calls from these customers for service, support and upgrades.

As NetApp clearly explains in their annual report, they use commodity parts. And for our customers who are no longer using NetApp for service and support we can supply the parts without the NetApp markup.

Our appliances are based primarily on commodity hardware, including Intel® Pentium® processors, an advanced implementation of the industry-standard PCI bus architecture, standard Ethernet adapters, and either Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL), Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), or Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) disk interconnects

So we base our service, support and upgrade business on a mix of identical commodity hardware purchased from the same sources that NetApp does, and used NetApp equipment which we get from trade ins and system take outs. Often when we buy systems they come with spares kits that were never even opened and so we have a lot of brand new unused NetApp equipment. And we purchase and stock transferable licensed filers which we provide to customers at a substantial discount to the prices NetApp charges.

I really like Dave Hitz, he took me to dinner once at a Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Baltimore. He seems like a really nice & sincere guy. But over the years he seems to have changed his tune about the direction of his processors – Flip Flopping between Intel & Alpha and back to Intel. His dislike for SANs was legendary, but he likes them now. I linked the quotes below to the complete articles they were taken from so you can read his thoughts in context. So what seems like a Flip Flop on SANs might be the invisible hand of the market forcing NetApp to focus on the needs of the customer.

“The claims of the SAN vendors sound similar to ours” said Hitz, “But they are dealing with raw disk data. Unix and NT file systems are very different”. NetApp’s file system software includes data sharing between Windows and NT, supporting NFS and CIFS data formats from both Unix and NT systems and HTTP for web support.

To put the announcement into perspective, before last week Network Appliance didn’t just specialize in NAS, it detested SANs. “For five years, I’ve been the guy on the stage telling you SANs suck,” said David Hitz, a Network Appliance founder and executive vice president of engineering, during the announcement.

No matter which way NetApp twists and turns in the future, our customers know that Zerowait will have the parts and technical support they require to keep their NetApp systems running reliably for years to come at a very reasonable price . Unlike NetApp which concentrates on their quarterly sales numbers, Zerowait is concentrating on providing our customers long term value from their current data storage infrastructures.

Yesterday I traveled to Philadelphia to visit the AIIM show, I saw the folks from EMC, Sony, NetApp, IBM and HDS. The showfloor was not very well attended and so I got a chance too talk to the folks manning the booths when they were not just talking to each other. Neither the IBM folks nor the NetApp folks I spoke to knew anything much about the new IBM & NetApp Alliance. I guess it takes a while for reality and the press releases to merge.

After I came back from the show I spoke to a customer about some transferable licensed NetApp F840’s with Cluster and NFS licenses. It seems that NetApp was offering him a price of over $120,000 for a clustered pair of FAS 270C’s. I told him to go to SPEC.org and check out the performance of the FAS 270 before buying one.

Zerowait has a large stock of Transferable Licensed NetApp filers in stock and ready to ship, we can configure them to meet your requirements. We look forward to having you join the Zerowait family of satisfied customers.

Today I received a call from a company that has C1105 NetCache units located around the world. They were told by NetApp that they had to upgrade their cache units, which will cost several hundred thousand dollars. I reccomended that the customer, save several hundred thousand dollars a year and allow us to provide spares kits and support for his NetCache units.

Many times CIO’s are put into the position of deciding to upgrade equipment and shave their staff or keep old equipment and maintain their staffing levels. If your equipment is working fine why do you need to upgrade? If your staff is already overworked how is buying new equipment going to reduce their workload?

Zerowait maintains NetApp equipment around the world. Reducing your equipment support costs while maintaining your High Availability requirements is our business. Zerowait has the NetApp parts you need, and we can ship today!