Zerowait Corporation

During this morning’s Customer Service meeting, one of our engineers suggested that we put up a special on our Blog to coincide with my speaking engagement during Interop next Tuesday. Darn good idea we thought! So, we are offering a pair of clustered F840 heads with NFS and Cluster for $39,000.00 with transferable licensing from NetApp. If you are interested in this special offer please call us at 888.811.0808. We have a limited supply of these units and they typically go pretty fast, but if you order a clustered pair we will test and configure the filers for you and ship to meet your requirements. Zerowait has them, and we will ship right away!

If you happen to be in Vegas for the Interop show next week and would like to schedule a few minutes together to talk about Zerowait’s affordable service, support and upgrade options for NetApp equipment – give us a call or drop us a note. Hopefully, I will be able to introduce you to some of the other members of the Zerowait family of satisfied customers.

Mike

First let me say thanks to Mike for posting to the blog the last 2 days. He did a great job!

If you are a current ZPA (Zerowait Parts Assurance) customer, you have, or will, receive an email from Zerowait with this advisory message.

Outdated disk firmware can lead to premature disk failures and other
issues, such as drives reporting as “broken” or “failed” when in reality they are not. Instead, they are being affected by one or more known bugs. Most of the known bugs have been fixed in the newer versions of firmware. Therefore, to minimize potential drive issues and improve drive reliability, Zerowait recommends maintaining your system on the latest available drive firmware.

The message will also have a list of your current discs, the up to date firmware revision number, and instructions for what to do.

The reason for this advisory message is that Zerowait has been getting numerous reports of bad drives. After down time and effort to replace the drive, it is determined that the drive itself is not bad, it just has outdated firmware. Consider this proceedure like a flu shot, no one likes to get them but the shot is better than the flu; no one likes to take the time to update the firmware of their drives, but a little time spent updating is better than down time replacing drives that aren’t really bad.

If you would like more help with this, call Zerowait.

Captain Rick is grounded with the Flu today and he asked me to write the Blog today.

Some people have asked where the company name Zerowait came from. I always believed in providing a quality service right away, and so I named the company after the concept of No Waiting. Zerowait’s online store reflects our customer service philosophy and makes quoting and ordering simple and fast. Our customers and distributors love our system because of its simplicity, and the speed with which we are able to process orders. If an ordering and quoting system can be made simple why would NetApp make a system complex and require training to use it?

According to Arrow’s Press release on the NetApp program –
“Once participants complete the computer-based training program they are required to create and configure a sample quote. Those participants who create a configuration with three or fewer errors will receive a cash prize.”

Shouldn’t quoting a NetApp system be simple? In a marketplace of intense competition and commoditization how can rewarding people to make less then 3 errors on an order be a good thing? At Zerowait, we try to get every order and quote correct the first time, and reward our customers with great prices, service, support for their NetApp equipment.
When it comes to NetApp parts ” Zerowait has them, and can ship today!“

Today I saw this news article about how Dell was going to target the NetApp products.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Dell Inc., working with partner EMC Corp. , said on Tuesday it was chasing a new chunk of the mid-range storage market, in a further challenge to joint rival Network Appliance

But it was only a few years ago that Dell & NetApp were best friends. These storage companies seem to trade partners as quickly as Paris Hilton .

Remember this quote from a few blogs ago?

Round Rock, Texas, November 4, 1998- Dell Press Release
“Network Appliance is the industry leader and pioneer of the key technology required to build true network attached storage solutions,” said Mike Lambert, senior vice president of Dell’s Enterprise Systems Group. “This alliance will broaden the reach of our storage line and help move Dell into a leadership position in bringing relevant storage technology to our customers worldwide.”

Zerowait provides High Availability and High Reliability service and support to our customers year in and year out. Yesterday, we shipped out parts to a customer with an 8 year old NetApp system. He knew Zerowait would have the parts to keep him running, you can trust us to maintain the parts you need to keep your critical data available for years to come.

Many people question the legalities of second hand equipment. It seems that manufacturers often use scare tactics to convince people to buy directly from them. These scare tactics often work because the IT managers don’t have the time to research these claims and they certainly can’t take any chances. Where as this may be a great marketing technique for the equipment manufacturers, it is not always true and certainly not always the best advice. Here is an article from Processor that does a pretty good job of explaining this.

There are definitely legal and safe ways to purchase used/remanufactured equipment. There are also legal ways to own and license this equipment. If you buy from a reputable source, like Zerowait, you can be sure that they know how to keep you legal.

Break-Fix shop vs. Engineering shop.

In a discussion with the Zerowait engineers, they explained to me that there are two types of IT shops, Break-Fix and Engineering. What kind of shop do you have?

A Break-Fix shop is one that, very simply put, fixes things that break. This is usually the case in a small company or a company with very large storage needs and smaller budget. These Break-Fix shops can be very good at getting the problem solved and are usually kept very busy with small issues. They are also very good at knowing who to call (They call Zerowait) if there is a larger or more complex problem.

On the other hand, an Engineering shop is one that is constantly planning ahead and looking for future problems and issues before they happen. This shop requires a lot more time and staff to keep up with the changing equipment and knowledge base. It also requires a larger budget and more in-depth training. A very understanding top office is also necessary; to some, it is hard to justify the cost of good engineers when things rarely break, even if they are the reason.

What does this mean to you? Both shops are very useful, but there are always times when it pays to have highly experienced help. That’s when you need to call Zerowait!
If you are planning any changes to your network, adding equipment, swapping out old equipment, updating firmware, or OS, call the Zerowait engineers ahead of time. They will point out possible issues and ways to prevent problems. The may even show that you don’t need to make the change at all, sometimes all you need to do is change some settings to get the extra performance you need. Don’t risk the down time, call Zerowait!

In today’s Search Storage, Arun Taneja, president and founder at Taneja Group, Hopkinton, MA, says, “The big problem with NAS is that [the devices] are islands unto themselves”. He goes on to say, “What happens if I want to move information from NAS box one to NAS box 52?”

On the other hand, NetApp says that NAS equipment solves these issues through consolidation of storage. Here is a quote from the NetApp Technical library. It comes under the heading “Key Reasons for Companies to Consolidate Storage” and says, “In the past, enterprises paid very little attention to data growth, focusing instead on database applications and servers to run them. This led to the creation of islands of storage to serve each individual database application, often resulting in underutilization and/or over provisioning of storages resources for each application. In today’s enterprise, management demands not only better access to information but an increased ROI from deployed resources.”

So which is it? Tell me what you think. Are they islands of storage, or could it be like Australia or Antarctica, a continent that looks like an Island? Is an island really such a bad thing; doesn’t Aruba sound pretty nice right now? Either way, Zerowait has the roadmap for getting your data where it needs to be.

I spend a lot of time hunting around for news and info to pass along to you. Lately it seems that the only news I can find about the NetApp world is the partnership with IBM. I have to admit; every time I scan through an article I feel the need to check it against my archives. I’m beginning to think they are just recycling an old article and changing a few names to make it new. Here is an example:

First there was Dell’s market reach….

Round Rock, Texas, November 4, 1998- Dell Press Release
“Network Appliance is the industry leader and pioneer of the key technology required to build true network attached storage solutions,” said Mike Lambert, senior vice president of Dell’s Enterprise Systems Group. “This alliance will broaden the reach of our storage line and help move Dell into a leadership position in bringing relevant storage technology to our customers worldwide.”

Now there is IBM’s market reach….

Armonk, NY and Sunnyvale, CA – April 6, 2005 NetApp Press release
“This relationship is really about pairing innovative NetApp storage solutions with IBM’s global market reach, service organization and technology portfolio,” said Dan Warmenhoven, Network Appliance Chief Executive Officer. “We expect this relationship to be mutually beneficial long-term as we roll out our joint solutions over the coming year.”

Am I experiencing Déjà vu?

One of the Zerowait engineers was telling me about a customer issue he was dealing with. He thought you all might learn something from it.

The customer had an equipment failure, so their engineers pulled one of their spares and put it in the system. When everything was powered up, the system still indicated the same failure. Their next step was to call Zerowait for expert advice. Good move!

After some troubleshooting and evaluation, it was determined that the spare that was put into the system was also bad. Two bad parts lead the customer to think that the failure was more serious than it was and also meant more down time.

How long have your spares been sitting collecting dust on the shelf? Do they still work properly? Did someone use the spare then put the bad part back in its place? What good is a bad spare? What can be done to safeguard against this type of scenario?
Zerowait can help prevent your company from going through this. Zerowait’s expert engineers will test, run, and re-certify your spares for you. Along with that Zerowait can store your spares for you, that way your parts are centrally located and proper, fully functioning part can be shipped to the location of your choice at the first sign of trouble.

Thanks for the post Mike! Maybe IBM can affect the way NetApp treats legacy equipment, but I won’t hold my breath. I can’t wait to hear more about your ASCDI experience. I’m sure there are plenty of other interesting things to talk about.

I hope that anyone who made it to Orlando also found time to catch up with Mike. In a phone call last week, he mentioned that he was meeting many interesting people. It sounds like he had a busy time.