* Posts by StorageEngineer

11 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Apr 2014

NetApp consciously uncouples from 500+ staff

StorageEngineer

Re: "Operationalising our Strategy"

Nice..so true!

Not sure if it is Tom Georegen's era in NetApp is responsible for this. But for sure he is on the hook for turnaround (if lucky).

I think NetApp strategy really went wrong and they have to take a hit to fix it. Even if they fix it, it will not be same as what they were in last 15-years as traditional storage market is shrinking YoY.

NetApp always chose path different than it's competition in initial 15-20 years. But recently they followed others for certain things (like FlashRay) and same time failed to adopt effective strategies to fend off new headwinds like AWS/Azure (cloud), hyper-convergence, All-Flash, data center technology, etc.

Another failure is on the acquisition front, neither do aggressive acquisitions nor digest acquisitions well!

ONTAP isn't putting NetApp ONTOP

StorageEngineer

It seems spinnaker acquisition sucked the juice out of NetApp. On top of that they could not acquire Data Domain. Again Tucci played Data Domain card nicely here.

If you ask me, NetApp needs Tucci to grow out of this mess.

StorageEngineer

Re: NotApp

>>> The industry is moving to Scale-Out NAS and it is increasingly choosing Isilon.

>> It is not choosing NetApp, or, as I like to think of them, NotApp.

Your post shows two things:

1. You are praising Isilon for your own interest

2. You are hating your competition for your love with Isilon!

Scale out NAS sounds like old story! Who knows, after NetApp Isilon is next to get impacted! Why do you think Tucci acquired DSSD, XtremeIO, Scale IO, Pivotal? Data domain/Isilon will be history soon and those new acquisitions (DSSD, XtremeIO, Scale IO, Pivotal) will be the growth segment. Boy gotta admire the Joe Tucci and his business sense!

EMC daddy Tucci: YES, there has been too much internal 'friction'

StorageEngineer

Acquisition is EMC's mojo

EMC is in business due to it's unbeatable acquisition strategy. I don't think there is any other company (even non-IT) which does such quality acquisitions (Vmware, RSA, data domain, isilon etc) and execution after that! Tucci is the man! He knows how to run the business. Perhaps it will not be wrong to say that he better than most CEOs of big giants like IBM/CISCO/HP.

Asking for spin off from EMC is like taking away their mojo! Spin off will give short term benefit but long run it will not be good....

Pure Storage developing converged systems

StorageEngineer

Hmm..is this endorsing more on the hyper convergence? Boy..good for Nutanix!

Either this is a stupid move or a brilliant move by Pure (given they are still a startup)!

VMware, Cisco, EMC lovechild to live in Big Daddy EMC's house

StorageEngineer

Sounds like inevitable a Nicira-aftermath...

This might impact VCE market share going forward unless EMC kicks out cisco replaces with other vendors. On the other hand, this might help other Cisco partner NetApp, Nimble etc, at least for short term.

NetApp offers ONTAP as a cloud for all seasons

StorageEngineer

Wow..that all sounds like gigantic ONTAP with all features.. does it perform in real??

>> All-flash FAS will offer 350,000 IOPS at less than 1.3msecs latency, which is a

>> 70 per cent improvement over cDOT 8.2 at that latency.

Is NetApp officially saying this??? This is so not-like NetApp. May be you are talking about FlashRay product and not FAS-ONTAP??? There is no way that gigantic ONTAP all flash can do this...if it does, netapp might be the big gainer in all flash market ..hard to believe..

where is this all information published?

NetApp gives its FAS range a 4 MILLION IOPS dose of spit'n'polish

StorageEngineer

At least what I know that with this upgrade, NetApp is offering hybrid flash arrays at same price as before upgrade. Same should be true for all SSD and note that NetApp did sell all flash before. It seems that they woke up now to optimize and sell it in the market.

Yes, you are right inline deduplication is missing peice with NetApp FAS arrays. But they do offer offline dedupe which is better from performance perspective (compared to inline) but delayed. They better come up with inline dedupe.

Otherwise data management feature perspective, they are king. EMC is also same boat with their high end arrays. If these two companies come up with decent IOPs (say top 10) on their traditional systems with all flash (not xtremeIO/EF series), it will be unmatched other than price. Pure is desperately trying to match the data management capabilities but it won't happen overnight. It takes time to evolve.

Nimble nearly nudging $200m: Claims all-Flash grunt with partial iron

StorageEngineer

Aggressive pricing reflects in Nimble's revenue

IMO Nimble is simply making roads by means of price (lower margins). They do not have anything significant new which EMC, NetApp and others have. Nimble just have same old product with only iscsi protocol. And yes their product which is hybrid array (HDD + SSD) is now old story and nothing different than EMC/NetApp. Full flash array is the new thing and they are lagging behind

They are definitely hurting NetApp more than EMC due pricing. I wonder why NetApp did not crush them but looks like they decided to maintain their margins than sales. Cloud is going to eat the low end/SMB market. What NetApp is facing on low end, same thing is going to be true for Nimble and any other hybrid array startups. For now it looks like Nimble is done after IPO.

Also it is just ridiculous see that uneducated analyst comparing Nimble with Pure storage and other all flash companies. Full flash is different territory. Pure has distinct advantage and head start in full flash array compared to EMC/NetApp. Nimble never had such advantage with their hybrid arrays.

In short, low price and superb marketing with Suresh V. they were able to pull it through IPO. And whatever it may be, they have done good job so far. But do not know where they will be after year or so.

BLAM! IBM drags its NetApp OEM deal horse outside, gunshot heard

StorageEngineer

More than it is one time trouble for NetApp, it was and will be troubling IBM due to conflicting products. In fact this conflict and lost margins will be huge compared that 2% impact to NetApp. Perhaps this OEM made sense at the begining 8-10 years back.

Looks like IBM is going to focus on its own or it will get out of storage completely given the its trend on getting rid of hardware.

If I what I heard is true, ironically Softlayer (now owned by OBM) uses NetApp storage. Even if N series goes away, NetApp seems to be in background via IBM cloud.

CDOT relatively crap for flash, hyperscalers crap for constant storage

StorageEngineer

All-flash ONTAP systems winning against XtremIO

Is this really true??? Can NetApp show any proof of this? If this true, forget about Pure or XtremeIO or any other pure flash product and NetApp should lead the all flash market...

Honestly title of this article does not make sense if All flash ONTAP FAS is winning against Xtreme IO. It is not possible that CTO of company is calling their own product as crap....