Posts by Franko Davidson 17 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
I don't know how to put this, but that is the risk you take when doing business with any company that is running venture capital. They could go out of business at any point. Like the de-motivational poster with at picture of the Titanic on it says "Sometimes your role in life is to be a warning to others"
From what I am seeing as a storage sales rep, customers are largely moving to 10K 6Gb 2U Shelf SAS drives down from the 15K 4U SAS drives because they take up less rack space, use less power and offer more bandwidth than the current 15K drives. I cannot remember the last time I sold a new system with 15K 3 1/2" SAS drives. The only time I see customer purchasing 15K SAS is to incorporate them into an existing 15K SAS array. That is why you are seeing 15K SAS sales as flat or declining. Not because they are buying flash, but because they are moving to 10K 6Gb SAS drives. Also the 15K 3 1/2 3Gb SAS drives will eventually be going away, so customers buying new systems are avoiding them to keep from painting themselves into a corner.
In full disclosure, I am a NetApp sales rep and am simply trying to make sure everyone is clear on the announcements as there is misinformation out there and there are important differences including the PAM support you mention with the more advanced code levels.
As a sales rep I have priced the new boxes against the old ones and customers are generally paying slightly less on an identically configured 3220 or 3250 than they had paid in the past on the3140 and 3160 a few years back. Your mileage may vary as there are many factors that go in to pricing, but that is my experience.
Regarding the PAM support, no vendor is going to go back and say that I am sorry the product that you have on the floor today that was designed 5 years ago doesn't support every combination of code and hardware available today, we will give you the new box at no charge. I know that sucks and I used to be a customer and have been on the receiving end of that, but unfortunately that is Information Technology.
Every vendor has their challenges. What I do know is NetApp is growing at 20% per year, is the #2 storage vendor in the world by revenue, the #1 midrange storage vendor by usable capacity shipped is the #1 provider of storage to the US Federal government and has the largest contiguous installation of storage in the world with 750PB at Lawrence Livermore, so despite the challenges, NetApp must be doing something right, or at least less wrong than the other storage vendors.
Not sure where you get your information, but the new FAS3220 and FAS3250 out perform the models they replace and they do it at a 20% lower list and a slightly lower street price. So yes your final cost might be similar to what you have paid in the past, but you are getting more for your money including the ability to do SSD cache and more FlashCache.
There is a bit more significance to the announcement than the 4TB drives and additional memory. In particular the additional SSD cache and FlashCache capabilities for workloads like large virtual desktop environments as well as more memory to support future code levels and enhancements including additional cluster mode capabilities.
The Reg storage desk covers everyone's new model announcements, so no reason not to cover these.
Yes, you are confused, understandably so with the simultaneous FAS6200 upgrades and E540 Flash. NetApp should have announced these separately as they have nothing to do with each other.
NetApp has two distinct and separate product lines, FAS and E-Seires. FAS is targeted towards general multipurpose data center storage and E-Seires is targeted towards Big Data, High Performance Computing and High Performance targeted computing.
The FAS6200 announcements are an update of the high end FAS multipurpose storage product line.
The E540 is a new product announcement for the E-Series purpose built storage product line.
This is probably just piling on at this point, but as others have said, BB users like the product for the keyboard. They should have came out with that one first. As a proud BB user, regardless of all the ribbing I get from my friends who have iPhones and Android Phones, I am still a BB fan. I am in sales and use my phone for two things, phone calls and e-mail. BB does both better than any product out there due to the sound quality and physical keyboard. IMO, Not coming out out with the Q10 keyboard model everybody wants first was a huge mistake and they are now paying for it. No wonder RIM is losing share with poor decisions like this. Someone should be fired.
Mine is the coat with the new Q10 in it (some day I hope to say that anyway)
I sell these products and It is nice to see Cisco is thinking about the little guy as there were a lot of customers that I just could not talk UCS or Flexpod with as it was overkill for them. I have had a challenge with this since Cisco started shipping UCS. Traditional Cisco UCS is way overkill for a small customer because you are purchaseing the infrastructure up front to support 5-10 chassis of cisco blades which equals anywhere form 20 - 80 physical servers. Factor in virtualization and you were essentialy investing in a base infrastructure to support hundres of discrete server workloads. While this is awesome for larger customers, the smaller customer simply could not justify buying in to this, so thank you Cisco for thinking about smaller acocunts and allowing more access to this technology.
While the revenue share graphs are valuable, they don't tell the whole story. It would also be valuable to see the by capacity and by units sold graphs as part of this and your IDC analysis as well. For example of the top three players in the graph SYM, NetApp, and Clariion, the SYM is by far more expensive than the other two. So if you go by capacity sold or units sold, the NetApp and the Clariion would probably be way higher on the graph than the SYM because they cost less per TB meaning considerably more copies of these OS's and more of these units are in use than the SYM. Revenue numbers alone just don't give a full picture of share.
Um, NetApp has been doing unified storage NFS, CIFs, iSCSI and FC for TEN years, the have been operating outside of their niche and taking share for some time now. If their day in the sun is over then why are they growing at 20% per year, are the #1 storage vendor (by a longshot) to the US Federal government, are the #2 storage vendor by revenue and the #1 storage vendor by usable capacity shipped?
Um, NetApp has been doing unified storage NFS, CIFs, iSCSI and FC for TEN years, it's been a long time since they only did NAS. If their day in the sun is over then why are they growing at 20% per year, are the #1 storage vendor (by a longshot) to the US Federal government, are the #2 storage vendor by revenue and the #1 storage vendor by usable capacity shipped?
Maybe I am crazy, but most investors purchase stock that is profitable. Maybe HP's problem has something to do with their 0.7% DIV/Yield and 2.93 EPS as compared to their main competitor IBM who has a 1.4% DIV/Yield and 7.18 EPS. Pretty much explains why HP's stock is selling at a bit under half of IBM's price. Maybe Hurd needs to go to a finance 101 class instead of complaining to his investors. Either that or become a better marketing company like Apple.
Mines the one with the stock market for dummies book in the pocket.
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