The storage market is very tough for everyone
The market is incredibly competitive, on top of that you have customers leveraging the cloud and also sweating their assets for longer - the net result is all the major vendors core products are down on revenue.
With regard to price I think it is absolutely true that NetApp was too expensive, but this was due to the lack of competition. I think you would say the same about the other four big players (EMC, HP, IBM and HDS).
This is no longer sustainable and I think NetApp has responded with significantly better value for money solutions - take a look at http://snsltd.co.uk/promotions/ for some examples.
I also think NetApp are in a decent place regarding cDOT as they have now finally "killed off" 7-mode.
Is there another storage platform out their that can match the capabilities of FAS? I don't think so, but I would be pleased to be proved wrong.
Comparing EMC's mid-market portfolio to FAS does not look good for EMC - I even wrote a blog about it at http://blog.snsltd.co.uk/is-there-another-storage-platform-as-feature-rich-as-netapp-fas/
Is FAS perfect? Absolutely not, there is huge room for improvement, but I still think it is better than anything else out there when it comes to its range of capabilities.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
