Posts by iStore

Qumulo: What the scale-out NAS market has been waiting for

One Trick Pony?

The word on the street is that Qumulo indeed has some slick telemetry capabilities - but that's about the whole story. A customer I spoke with indicated that the product had next to nothing in terms of enterprise features/functionality - and was ho-hum from a performance perspective. When budget-starved customers who are currently getting seed kit for free need to pay real dollars, I wonder if the real-time analytics will carry the deal for a relatively feature-less, slower product from a startup? Oh by the way, speaking of slick telemetry capabilities - get a roadmap from Isilon concerning their upcoming "Riptide" release of OneFS.....

ONTAP isn't putting NetApp ONTOP

NotApp

NetApp’s topline revenue growth has been flat for the last 2 years and is expected to DECLINE in their current fiscal year, which ends April 30, 2015. That will mean 3 consecutive years of flat or negative growth. Put another way: In a Scale-Out NAS market with a 16% CAGR, NetApp is flat or down for 3-straight years. Oof.

Contrast that with Isilon’s growth. Isilon has grown revenues from $200M in 2010 (the year EMC acquired the company) to $1.3B in 2014. That’s over 5.5X growth in 4 years, including 26% Y/Y growth in 2014 on a $1B number (compared to 25% Y/Y growth in 2013 – which means Isilon actually accelerated growth in 2014 over 2013). 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.

NotApp's CEO blamed it on “sales execution issues,” among other things. I actually agree with that – his sales team isn’t winning deals. They are getting their heads kicked in by XtremIO in the AFA space – and by Isilon in the File space.

Get this, though: Their operating margin is healthier than ever. So, topline revenue is down, margin is up. What does that say? Personally, I think it means that they're losing when it's a competitive deal – but when they do an un-contested deal or an un-contested refresh, they do so on their terms at their price points. Customers doing deals with NotApp and not introducing competition are leaving a ton of money on the table.

NetApp is the Blackberry of the storage industry. They’re still alive, they have a decent product and a huge install base of largely loyal, happy customers. But they are confused, lost, no longer strategically relevant, losing share all over the place and their ultimate demise is not a question of if, but when.

IDC: Who's HOT and who's NOT (in object storage) in 2014

All Oject Included?

Chris - Quick question: does this report include any/all Object-based storage for the given vendors. So, as an example, if EMC offers Object services via Centera, Atmos, ECS, Isilon and ViPR Data Services, is this capturing total Object market share across all of these platforms? Tom