The end of the year is a time for reflection on this year’s events and planning for next year’s business opportunities. Our customers faced a lot of challenges this year and so did we as the economy changed, the internet faced new challenges and new regulations took effect.
As the economies of Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, and the USA changed this year our business changed to meet the demands of companies and governments with tighter budgets and growing storage requirements. To meet the demand many of our old and new customers wanted to expand their legacy NetApp infrastructures. With tight budgets they needed a partner who would work with them to provide cost effective solutions for NetApp equipment and support, and Zerowait’s business grew to meet these needs. On the operations side, we had to work with a new bank that specialized in foreign currency exchange to meet the needs of one of our customers with many international divisions. The bank we have been using for two decades was unable to help us because of new Dodd Frank regulations. Interestingly, the new bank we are using offers better credit card processing rates than our old processor, so while Zerowait experienced some unexpected consequences because of the new regulations, our new banking partner had a better credit card solution which was an unexpected benefit.
Our customers around the world depend on the internet for their business success and so does Zerowait. We all recognize that all business is now global and our partnerships span the world. The issues of cyber liability and data breach raised their heads this year and the changing insurance landscape and vulnerabilities that corporate networks face have caused everyone to take another look at the centralization of storage in corporate networks and the security of on line data. As storage grows with the expansion of the internet of things, every company needs to have a business continuity plan that includes strategy for data access to critical files like accounting and operations if their network is breached. Perhaps silos and private cloud still have their place in modern storage architecture.
Just like the banking challenge we faced in 2014 led us to a better solution in another part of our business, we expect that many of the challenges in 2015 will also bring innovative solutions for our customers willing to look outside the box to solve their problems. We look forward to working with you to make 2015 a success
Monday, December 22, 2014
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
U.S. Government Funding Bill Delays IANA Transition
Breaking: U.S. Government Funding Bill Delays IANA Transition
On
the evening of Tuesday, September 9th, Congressional leaders
unveiled a 1,603 page, $1.01 trillion FY 2015 appropriations bill to fund the
U.S. government through the end of September 2015. One provision of the omnibus
bill would delay the IANA transition until after the September 30, 2015
expiration of the current contract between the NTIA and ICANN.
Language
in the bill
states:
SEC.
540. (a) None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to relinquish
the responsibility of the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration during fiscal year 2015 with respect to Internet domain name
system functions, including responsibility with respect to the authoritative
root zone file and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority functions.
(b) Subsection (a) of this section shall
expire on September 30, 2015.
That
language, a modified version of the “Duffy Amendment” that was contained in the
House version of the National Defense Authorization Act, would allow NTIA to
start spending funds on a transition after exercising its first option to
extend the contract.
In
addition, the explanatory report language of the Commerce-Justice-State portion
of the omnibus spending bill, in which the above language is contained, states
the following:
Internet
governance.-The agreement reiterates House and Senate language regarding the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) matters and modifies Senate language by
directing NTIA to inform appropriate Congressional committees not less than 45
days in advance of any such proposed successor contract or any other decision
related to changing NTIA's role with respect to ICANN or IANA activities. In
addition, NTIA shall submit a report to the Committees on Appropriations within
45 days of enactment of this Act regarding any recourse that would be available
to the United States if the decision is made to transition to a new contract
and any subsequent decisions made following such transfer of Internet
governance are deleterious to the United States.
This
language appears to require NTIA to inform Congress 45 days prior to extending
the IANA contract or taking any other decision in regard to it; as well as to
submit a report to Congress within 45 days after the spending bill’s enactment
regarding whether the US would have any post-transition recourse if subsequent
decisions were deleterious to the U.S.
This
final bill language has already been negotiated with and accepted by Senate
Democratic and House Republican leaders and is likely to be enacted and sent to
President Obama by the weekend. It is unlikely that the White House would veto
the bill and risk a government shutdown over this IANA language (although other
provisions could become sticking points between the Administration and
Congress).
Rumors
were already circulating in Washington that NTIA was prepared to extend the
current IANA contract by at least six months in recognition of the fact that it
may be impossible for the ICANN community to design and stress test enhanced
accountability measures by the end of the current contract term, much less have
them in place by then. So the bill may have little effect on the actual
timetable for the transition. It remains to be seen what reaction to its
enactment comes from ICANN, the ICANN community, and other nations.
Philip S. Corwin, Founding Principal
Virtualaw LLC
1155 F Street, NW
Suite 1050
Washington, DC 20004
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
Customer Conversations and Product Development
I
will start this blog by mentioning that I travel a lot; as a business owner I
believe that it is important to visit our customers, and as our business has grown
internationally this requires me to travel a lot of the year. By visiting our
customers I learn a lot about what our customers are thinking. For example, our
SimplStor Product Line was developed based customer requests in the USA, and
one of our Australian customers encouraged us to develop a CCTV storage
version. That Niche has become a major part of our US SimplStor business.
Over
the last year, many of our NetApp CIFS customers have been asking for a
SimplStor alternative for who do not want to upgrade to OnTap CDot 8.2+.
They are looking for a High Availability windows based storage solution that
has the support they depend on from Zerowait. So over the last few months we
have developed a SimplStor HA storage solution and based on customers’ suggestions
we’ve built it to be used with VM’s and Veeam to work in multi location
infrastructures. We’ve installed and tested this solution in our own
environment with our own data and app servers. Vmware’s SRM and
Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 have worked very well. As part of our
testing we included mirroring to a slow cable upload connection to test it as
if it was used on a remote rural site. It worked perfectly, and as one of our
engineers said – “The SimplStor R2 storage server rocks!”
Over
the last month I have been in Australia and New Zealand and traveling around
the USA to visit our clients. Our customer base in Australia and New
Zealand continues to grow as more people look for affordable solutions for
their legacy NetApp support. Additionally, our SimplStor storage line continues
to grow and the Australian market interest in our CCTV storage and SimplStor
with Windows R2 is strong and we expect 2015 to be a very good year in the
region.
As
the Zerowait team travels the world and works with our Global customers we
continue to discover new market opportunities for our NetApp support and
SimplStor products, and as a storage and networking company we continue to grow
by delivering solutions that our customers want.
Friday, October 03, 2014
Work Arounds
Over the last few months we have been rebuilding our network
infrastructure which has been evolving with our business over the last 25 years.
The last major upgrade we did was in 2002 and since then there have been a lot
of additional servers and people added to the company. As we grew and added to
our network we kept adapting what we had to make it work, so there were many
work arounds and slowly but surely we grew a very complicated tapestry of a
network design. Last year we decided
that our engineering team would slowly rebuild our network infrastructure and
storage design in between working on customer issues and storage
implementations. In addition, we would change our phone system (VOIP) also, but
we manage the phone system as part of Administration and not part of our
Network.
Once we determined that a rebuild was required we had to
decide what was critical infrastructure and what order things could be worked
on. Based on what we learned about the new insurance rules on Cyber Liability
and Data Breach we determined that we had to keep all data and email functions
in house to remain in compliance with the insurance rules and the contracts we
had with customers in regards to data security.
Changing our Physical Servers into Virtual Machines was one
of the first things we did and the project went well. We were able to reduce
our footprint in our server rooms and we learned some tricks of the trade that
already have helped us in supporting our customers who are working in Virtual
Machine environments. In the process of virtualizing we were able to clean up
quite a few accumulated workarounds in our server architecture and we
modernized quite a few of the bits and pieces of our network.
Next came the task of upgrading our routing and switching
between our locations to help with our Disaster Recovery and Business
Continuity plans. As our network had
grown over the last 12 years we had added some interesting work arounds that
allowed applications to talk to each other and created subnets for projects
that no longer existed. Throughout the process of re engineering our network we
had to keep considering what we had to be prepared for over the next few years
in business and as we got closer to completing the project a customer had a
request that we had not considered and we needed to consider whether to start
the work around process again or purchase new equipment to handle the new
customer request.
We also decided to outsource our phone system and got rid of
our Nortel Meridian system. We researched a lot of providers and when we
decided on the provider to go with we still did a lot of testing and tried to
anticipate everything that our company and our customers would request. Even
though we thought we had covered everything we would need, within a week we had
to figure out a way to insert a code into the displayed number to indicate the
call routing to the individual user along with a redesign of the way our follow
me and hunt groups worked.
Despite our attempt to remove all workarounds, it seems we
are constantly having to adapt one part of our Network, Servers or Storage to some new trigger or
requirement, whether it be a virus, malware or a new customer request or
service enhancement that we are going to provide. As a company we are all pretty adaptable to
new situations and customer requests, and as we rebuild our network it has become clear that no matter how much we try to build a logical
network design, inevitably we are going to have to have some workarounds in the
tapestry that is our Zerowait infrastructure.
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