SolidFire chief talks up secret upcoming hyperconverged system

SolidFire boss Dave Wright talked with El Reg and discussed the vendor's upcoming hyper-converged system based on its own nodes. Wright was SolidFire CEO when NetApp bought the company towards the end of 2015 and is now VP and General Manager of SolidFire within NetApp. We tried, but were unable to get him to talk any about …

[Anonymous Coward]

Solidfire...is it making any revenue?

A lot of talk of AFF revenue's in NetApp earnings but never a mention about SolidFire... $870M and a year later what has this acquisition accomplished?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Solidfire...is it making any revenue?

What has any aquisition ever accomplished at NetApp ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Solidfire...is it making any revenue?

Engenio is by far NetApp's most successful and by far, most profitable acquisition. However, all good things come to an end. E-Series is on a very short leash both from an investment and platform longevity perspective.

[Zerolab]

Re: Solidfire...is it making any revenue?

According to IDC a total of $60M in 2016, that's 0.13% market share, I bet Nimbus has more...

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero Growth

is SolidFire's contribution to NetApp's revenue. They've had ~$60-65mil revenue when NetApp acquired them and they still have about the same.

If NetApp had to do it all over again, they would not have moved forward with this acquisition. Now, they are trying to make an HCI play out of it. Clearly, the AFA play didn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Zero Growth

Why not skip HCI and copy the next big thing?

[Roj Blake]

Proprietary

What are the odds that the hardware will only work with other Solidfire products?

Surely, in the age of software-defined everything it's better to buy some off the shelf servers and put Openstack on them?

[lordnorth]

How is this hyperconverged?

I thought in order for something to be classified "hyperconverged" it had to run both the storage/compute functions on the same box. That doesn't appear to be what this describes. Looks like a traditional Solidfire cluster attached to some servers if you ask me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How is this hyperconverged?

hypothetical

1, running this as a VM on a hypervisor. Which one? ESXi for sure, Hyper-V in case Microsoft wants to buy NetApp, KVM may not be feasible because of engineering effort. Or running this as a container on Linux/CentOS or even BSD viz foundation for Ontap.

2, leverage the Solidfire backend file system to scale because it doesn't seem like there is any proprietary hardware.

3. expose storage back out as iSCSI volumes. May even look at NFS/SMB3.0 if they can leverage Ontap code.