Zerowait Corporation

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!

Not everyone is clueless when it comes to storage solutions. I have run into many IT people who really enjoy staying on top of the current trends and equipment. They take pride in being able to talk storage with the best of them.

If your IT shop is lucky enough to have people like this in it’s staff, then you probably have a smooth running shop. However, you probably also have a few ideas about how to make things run better. Do you dare test them in your live environment? I can understand your hesitance to experiment where critical data is stored.

Zerowait has a solution for you! Zerowait can use their vast knowledge and access to equipment to help you test your innovative ideas in a real world environment, without putting your data at risk. Zerowait can duplicate your current system, then test the changes, run them, and make sure your data will be safe! Once everyone is convinced that the idea is helpful and safe, Zerowait can then help you implement the solution in your live environment.

Just another way Zerowait can help keep you safe and growing all at the same time!

When asked about building strong customer relationships, this is what Mike Linett, President of Zerowait had to say, “All customers are different. So are their networks. That’s why there are no cookie cutter solutions for high availability, despite what some vendors will tell you. Further, “Bleeding Edge” technology isn’t necessarily the answer. There’s your investment in legacy equipment to consider, for one thing, and shifting corporate objectives, for another. Often, networks mutate rather than evolve, changes coming in reactive mode to crisis. As a result, IT staffers are overworked and have little time for planning and design tasks. Maintaining data security and availability become acts of defensive warfare rather than carefully considered preventive measures.

The good news is that data security and availability are possible, largely within the bounds of your current architecture. It sometimes just takes a knowledgeable outside observer to pinpoint troublesome areas and recommend simple steps for improving those areas. Many times, rethinking the existing environment will solve the problem; other times the addition of cutting edge technologies is required. Zerowait can assist during all phases-from analysis, planning, transition, and implementation. We’re also there afterward, to ensure continued satisfaction.”

In the many years that I have been involved with Mike Linett and the fine folks at Zerowait, I have noticed that they go out of their way to keep their customers happy. All good companies have good friends who become customers; Zerowait has customers that become good friends. At Zerowait, a happy customer is a future customer and a friend for life.

When Jon Toigo writes I don’t like to mess with it. The best thing I can do is just put his own words here for you all to read!

From Toigo’s column, this is very important!

Some Out of the Box Thinking from Zetera

I just had a conference call with slide deck walkthrough with some folks from a startup called Zetera. I have to tell you that their stuff knocked my socks off.

During a typical week at Zerowait I get two or three calls from emerging storage vendors, that would like us to introduce them to our client base. Part of the job of being President of a company is to decide which products are worth looking at. It should not be surprising that most companies do not emerge with a viable product from their labs, no matter what the marketing and sales folks tell you.

At Zerowait, we believe in testing products in real world environments, but we also like to check out whether a company plans to be in business for a while. So many of our customers complain about the orphaned products that are part of their infrastructures, that we check out the emerging companies business plans and finances carefully before we reccomend a product. I don’t want to recommend a product that will become a critical part of a company’s infrastructure, but have no supprt within two years. Not surpisingly very few companies meet the criteria of our customers for a viable product. Extinction is a fact of life on this planet, and also a fact of business.

Business is about profit and loss, but also about risk. Our customers depend on us to help them manage their risk at a reasonable cost. Our NetApp products support business grows weekly because Zerowait is focused on providing outstanding value to our customers. There are a lot of interesting technologies being developed currently and I am looking forward to seeing one or two that can help our customers increase their profits while decreasing their risks.

Mike