Zerowait Corporation

Good Monday to everyone! If anyone, especially Zerowait’s European customers who would like to set up a meeting with Mike Linett, he will be in London this week. Mike will be attending the ASCDI, 2005 EUROPEAN CONFERENCE.

It is a great opportunity for the European Zerowait customers and anyone who might like to be a customer to get to know Mike and July. They don’t find their way across the pond that often. Call Zerowait today and set up an appointment to meet with them; they would love to see you while they are there!

Sun Purchases StorageTek: Possible Implications

Many of our customers are both Sun and StorageTek customers so this acquisition has our interest. Zerowait is concerned about how to help our customers maintain their legacy infrastructures to enable them to get the most for their storage investment, and an acquisition often results in the shrinking of support and engineering staffs of the acquired company. Additionally, when you have influential companies like these joining forces there are typically staff reductions in sales staff of the acquired company. Finally there are the long term branding and strategy concerns that customers should be concerned with for the 3 to 5 year period after the initial equipment purchase. For Sun, in our opinion, this acquisition really represents a purchase of a customer list and a brand—technology and real estate play a lesser role.

As Sun takes over the StorageTek marketing and sales functions, they will be forced to slash staff right after they absorb StorageTek’s contact and customer databases. Similarly, StorageTek’s engineering and technical staff will also be affected because both companies brand assemblies made of commodity parts. The business logic maintains that you can get by with fewer engineers to support them. But this would be faulty logic, and problematic for owners of StorageTek equipment. Indeed, the transition period could mean loss of timely technical services support (changing phone/email contacts, changing personnel, untrained techs), but the bigger danger is that, over the next few years, StorageTek customers risk the loss of the long-term expertise required by their niche storage products. As knowledgeable StorageTek personnel find themselves “let go”, the remaining support engineers will have responsibility for more products; this can mean dilution of product knowledge. Additionally, stocks of readily available spare, replacement or upgrade parts will likely diminish—product knowledge disappearing with it. We see that today with our own NetApp legacy parts: newly minted resellers haven’t a clue about which parts are compatible with which systems; nor are most parts available through manufacturer channels. Thus, infrastructure managers need to factor the elimination of support and spares as part of the corporate “right sizing” into mid-term technology refreshment plans. Zerowait considers mid-term to be 2 to 4 years after acquisition of product. Since this type of acquisition takes between 18 months and 24 months to accomplish, we would suggest that customers begin reevaluating their storage infrastructures soon.

We would expect that there will be quite a few orphaned products as soon as Sun’s folks complete the absorption process. Why? The merger brings Sun’s Storage business into competition with its new acquisition’s storage business. They both sell RAID Solutions that are assembled from parts by Xyratex, Seagate, Intel and Qlogic. The internal politics and elimination of overlapping products will take many unforeseen paths, but you can be certain that many customers will be left with unsupported products because of this merger.

Many of you may remember when Chrysler purchased AMC / Jeep. The AMC cars were quickly eliminated from the product mix. And the Jeeps were changed to use more and more Chrysler parts. The brand remained, but the product changed. Chrysler was then absorbed by Daimler. The Plymouth brand was eliminated, and Chrysler’s employees and staff were decimated. Chrysler’s share of the market has tumbled as it has lost its product’s identity. Plymouth is just a memory. I expect that StorageTek will suffer the same fate.

Here is some good news to start your weekend right!

In a Forbes article about Pillar Data Systems, you can read, David Hitz, cofounder and head of engineering at NetApp, agrees that low-end storage technologies will move up the performance ladder, just as PC technologies did. But NetApp is in on the trend, too. “We have a single software system, and we can cut our prices to gain market share,” he says.

Does this mean that NetApp has been charging too much for new equipment? Can we all call and ask for the Dave Hitz discount? Or are they just going to lower their prices? Inquiring minds want to know.

Zerowait has the equipment you need at reasonable prices now!

Our thanks to someone at NetApp!

Mike doesn’t like to admit this, but not everyone knows about Zerowait, YET. So those who don’t are likely to call NetApp first when they need parts or service. We got a call this week from a new customer who did just that, they called NetApp looking for an X221A drive. I have no idea who they spoke to at NetApp, but whomever it was suggested they call Zerowait. Now Zerowait has another satisfied customer!

Although we don’t know who at Netapp referred them to us, we certainly appreciate their help and their recognition that Zerowait stocks a tremendous amount of legacy drives, adapters, and other essential parts. So thank you Netapp for the referral; as you know Zerowat has the legacy inventory and can ship today!

NetApp’s Grid computing Vision – We don’t get it , and we have been following their changes in direction for years. – I think they are lost. If you can find the road map from these quotes and news stories we certainly would appreciate your help and I am certain the rest of our blog readers will also.

DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / NOVEMBER 18, 2002: VOL. 1 NO. 23

NetApp FAS900 Grid Clustered Failover Solution

Network Appliance is now shipping the InfiniBand-based solution from JNI Corporation and Mellanox Technologies with its new FAS900 series to provide the core interconnect technology for NetApp grid clustered failover high availability solutions. …
“InfiniBand features low latency, low CPU overhead, and high data throughput, making it the ideal technology for cluster interconnect,” said Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance.

OK … so the Grid is a 900 series unit that is clustered running version 6.X, But then the Spinnaker purchase suggests another direction for NetApp Grid. 05 Nov 2003

According to Hitz, the most important thing that Spinnaker’s technology brings to the table is its ability to scale its global file system and global management capabilities to gigantic capacity points.
Spinnaker’s distributed architecture lets users tie multiple NAS servers together, which creates a large, scalable server that can be managed as a single storage resource through one interface.

But in January 2004 NetApp tries to clears things up a little – but clouds things a bit also, NetApp seems to be embracing interoperability instead of proprietary solutions. So why then did they buy Spinnaker?

InfoStor January, 2004 Author(s) : Lisa Coleman
“We saw what was happening in the compute grid space and we matched it in the storage space. It’s not about building the biggest box. It’s about having components that work together so you can scale incrementally, both inside and outside the data center,” says Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance.

OK … so the Grid is a 900 series unit that is clustered but has something to do with stuff that is inside and outside the data center. We are lost.. what happend to the 900 series cluster running version 6.X as a Grid? Is the stuff outside the datacenter a NetCache?

12/2/2004 – Flash ! We hear about a ‘Three phase roadmap ‘ :
“The aim is not to disrupt ONTAP customers,” said Dave Hitz, VP and co-founder of Network Appliance. “Think of the upgrade like moving from Windows to Windows NT. There’s a long overlap period … All future development is focused on the next-generation product, but we’ll support both.”
At a media and analyst event in New York, NetApp said its three-phase roadmap for introducing the grid-based operating system will be transparent to users as it plans to take features from its existing Data ONTAP OS and incorporate them into the SpinServer product.

What is the three phase road map? We have not seen it mentioned again. Are 700 series and 800 series units going to be able to do a Grid? Finally NetApp clears things up. MAY 31, 2005 they have a four year plan!
Over the next three to four years, predicts Hornung, virtually all storage will be grid-like in that it will be based on smaller, easily integrated building blocks that can scale horizontally in performance and capacity in seamless pools of storage. Until then, though, look carefully under the hood at purported grid storage and base your purchase decision on the real-world problems it solves.

But now we learn it all is about virtualization….
6/1/05 Tim Pitcher, NetApp VP for strategy and business development, says

Where is NetApp going?
But bringing out bigger and better boxes for NAS and FC/IP SAN applications isn’t the main event. It’s necessary, but the main event, the direction NetApp is pursuing, is: “A storage environment, a grid, which provides a global single storage environment that manages provisioning and compliance in a single global namespace. This is the holy grail; this is what everyone will want to get to.”

In other words a Data ONTAP-mediated storage environment. Virtualisation is a key aspect of this, an underlying, an under-pinning technology. Pitcher says: “For other vendors the message is do you want to provide the virtualisation or be virtualised?”

So a Grid is a virtualized namespace for now?, should we suppose that it has nothing to do with the former 900 series cluster, and the inside and the outside of the datacenter?

No matter which way this story ends, Zerowait will support your NetApp hardware for years to come!

Here I go again, reading between the lines of another NetApp press release.

In the latest Press Release, NetApp Unveils Midrange NAS Array, you will see that “Glenn Harper, director of data strategy at New York-based Cendant, said the company plans to add FAS3000 models during the next year.” That is all well and good, but according to last week’s press release, Suresh Vasudevan says, “Typical storage array capacity utilization is in the 30 percent to 40 percent range…” So wouldn’t it make more sense to optimize the equipment you have, rather than spend a lot of money buying new equipment that you will continue to underutilize?
Zerowait can help you find ways to more efficiently use the capacity that Mr. Vasudvan and NepApp feel you are not currently using. Zerowait solutions can be far more economical than buying the latest, NetApp hardware.

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!