Posts by WYSIWYG650 54 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2016
regardless of how you feel about the pay of salespeople, screwing a top performer is always a bad move for a sales culture. I agree the product/R&D should be the primary investment but to think that a salesperson does not play a strategic role is wrong. They get paid that amount of money for a reason, if it was easy, everyone would do it.
I agree we need to know more and question everything that cannot be verified as fact. Did you see the US Gov just went in a pulled a bunch of viruses off Corp systems they say were infected by this. They did so without telling them beforehand.... that should not even be legal, imo.
TX finally proves to anyone reasonable that the cost of low regulation is paid for in blood. Dont you worry, Ted Cruz is in Cancun and will be OK.
If you think TX is mad now, wait until they get the preditory power bills that will very surely be insult to injury! Meanwhile Joe Rogan will have a new 3 hours episode with Elon Musk explaining once again why TX is better than CA...
any growth in a shrinking HW market is notable, you need to take share to do that.
they also reported more than $150M of ARR cloud revenue for the quarter. This is all being resold via the hyperscalers without NetApp having to build their own. Cloud company valuations are not uncommon to be 25X rev. If or when NetApp gets to $1B ARR cloud revenue the stock will be orders of magnitude of what it is now. EMC is a mess with their new lift and shift line up and Pure has yet to make money after 10 years in business. Every HW company has a cloud story but how many of them have solutions with revenue to prove it? It's still an IF on whether they can make the cloud transition but they are way ahead of their competition and accelerating.
The cloud at Enterprise scale is certainly not cheaper than HW. The reason org's choose the cloud is agility and speed. Many come back to hybrid/cloud once they realize they dont need the data in the cloud and can duplicate the agility with containers and other devop technologies.
Azure NetApp files is Enterprise NAS running on NetApp HW within Azure and being resold only by MS. It is cloud native and not even sold by NetApp directly. That is a huge new upside, think of all the MS sales reps and new opportunities it will bring. Same thing with GCP, they are doing the same and in both instances you pay the hyperscaler and not NetApp. NAS at scale with performance is too hard for them to build themselves...That is why they resell NetApp as an OEM cloud partner.
It's like back to the future... mini mainframes coming back like vombies. Right now I think it is way oversold and often does not achieve the success that was intended. I also see an empowerment of shadow IT, aka VMWare and Apps owners, driving demand just to help them avoid dealing with slow internal processes. I think it is similar to cloud, we all know it is not cheaper(at scale) but the agility makes the extra cost worth while to app owners and VMWare end users. The power of the purse is moving and these solutions are working to take advantage of that dynamic.
This use of data to try and predict the future is pretty weak use of the data. I remember when the Reg clamed that NetApp flash was dead.... A few years ago NetApp was 5th or 6th in market share and that was the data you used at the time. Now we have a similar slow start and a similar dramatic response. If NetApp gets traction with HCI like it did with All Flash...you will have to change your tune. NetApp is #2 in all Flash, and with EMC completely fork lift refreshing its entire line up, it would not be hard to see NetApp taking #1. Nutanix and VSAN have hit the scaling wall and will not be able to continue growning at this pace until they figure out how to run Enterprise applications and not just SMB and ROBO use cases. I know many of the Nutanix and VSAN folks will reply back saying how wrong I am, but to that I would say, we may have different definitions for what "enterprise scale" is.
Which is worse? The flawed archtecture, that is over marketed, or the blaming of sales and marketing for lack of growth? Nutanix is trying to go it alone with almost no eco system partners, in this day and age, customers are not interested in lock in hardware with a lock in cloud to go with it. They will continue to fall until some big company, that lacks any real HCI play, will buy them.
NetApp and VMware are the only real leaders in this space. Data mobility is a competitive advantage and the demand for this functionality will continue to grow. Both NetApp and VMWare have very strong solutions in that area, including cloud and hybrid cloud. The rest of the vendors may have one or two cool features, like pretty graphs or really good dedup, but being an island of storage will not allow the innovation that modern IT requires. Pure has recently invested in Kubernetes, so they are one to watch out for. As further example of my claim of data mobility investment and innovation, VMware purchased Heptio and NTAP purchased Stackpoint Cloud now NKS.
NetApp has a brand new Exadata killing technology that lets you take full advantage of all the amazing hardware power. Max Data, formerly Plexistor, is the technology and it works by going around the legacy kernel communication protocols. Think tier 0 running off SCM with full data protection and flash as your tier 1. It is not a cache and supports full read/write at single digit microsecond latency without having to rewrite your application. NetApp also is the first to market, and maybe still the only major player, to have NNMe from end to end without reverting back to SAS at the drive. the A800 supports the NVMe protocol, drives, and has a 100Gbs back plane with the OnTap data fabric features for data mobility, snaps, clones to and from the cloud, white box, object...etc.
Innovation, yes, but what decade? I like how Nimble is both trying to play nice, and by nice I mean connecting their hardware to a cloud, and at the same time, admitting they are competing against the cloud. That does not sound like a winning strategy. HW vendors that are innovated are partnered with hyberscalers and sell with, and not against them more often than not. I can think of one such HW vendor, but I have a feeling you know who I will say...
I really loved this article. Pure seems to admit that fast islands of storage are not innovative enough and need data mobility to be current. I wonder if any other companies have any technologies for data mobility or dare I call it "data fabric'...? What if, you could run the same storageOS on white boxes, engineered appliances and in the cloud with secure, cost efficient data mobility? That would be cool or even #datadriven
Nimble...? Are they still around? Oh, not for long. HPE will put it out to pasture or blend it with their other mediocre storage. How many "lucky" quarters has NTAP had? quite a few and by now it's starting to seem pretty obvious that NetApp is the only game left in town. ONTAP storage OS runs on white box, engineered system, cloud, hybrid, and supports all protocols(minus object). Best of breed AI reference architecture with NVIDIA and the ability to serve your needs from edge to core to cloud and the data fabric is no longer vapor. Please help me understand what innovations Nimble is up to? Oh and if they get HCI right....good night Irene.
With most of the Amazon fortune amusing at top, keeping your workers off public assistance is the very least they can do.(this will not quite do that) As much as I would like to think this was a feel good moral decision, I am reminded that we are in a very tight labor market going in to xmas and Amazon is looking and acting like Walmart more and more each day. Smart of them regardless of the motivation.
If anyone had any doubt about NTAP's cloud leadership this should help convince you... Not only are they cloud native in all the hyper scalers right now, they are building their capabilities much further. Can anyone name any other storage platform that has any cloud functionality other than S3 exports? pls dont say VMware, that is agnostic of storage and could be used by netapp HW too.
How is Pure above and to the right of NetApp? Who sells more is a great example and evidence of ability to execute. Completeness of vision is the next category and let's talk about that for a moment. Name one feature or capability that Pure can do that NetApp cannot? I'll predict the feedback of ease of use and maybe reporting benefits but I would argue those strengths of Pure do not even come close to the long list of things that NetApp can do that Pure can only dream of. Like real features that took many years of investment...cloud capability, data mobility, multi-protocol support, and more. Pure does a fantastic job of marketing and partnering and the architectures are fast but silo'd and limited in scale out and software maturity. It's good for NetApp and the market to have a strong competitor like Pure. EMC and HPE are weak at best and do not compete any where near as much as they did in the recent past.
Pure is pretty good, it is fast, easy with good analytics and even better dedup. Those are all table stakes these days and even tho they do those things better, they are not really adding any net new functionality or features. NetApp Flex pod has cloud connectivity and can also snap to white boxes. Data Mobility or as NetApp calls it the Data Fabric represents more value by allowing you to put the data where you want it cheaply and easily. The other funny thing to note is only NetApp has NVMe all the way through, Pure does not. Pure also makes a big deal about their AI airy system, as they should, but this is another example of a great story but a weak platform. NetApp A800 scales 4X more than airy and supports multi protocol and cloud connectivity. edge to core to cloud...no way Pure touches that with any amount of marketing.
So true, also silos of storage in a product line that requires 3 different systems to do what other vendors can do in a single system. No real cloud support, over aggressive promises and selling around effective or other ways that could be seen as deceptive. Pure has some great legacy old school solutions but the market needs cloud enabled solutions that support hybrid cloud and data fabric...Pure is not there.
The claim by Pure that they are the only technology with NVMe everywhere is complete nonsense. 2 versions of FAS hybrid has NVMe. the clami Netapp only has high end NVMe is a lot like them claiming AI superiority. Easy to say, lets see how the dust settles and who wins. I would not bet Orange. Pure is taking storage back to the 90's where silo's rule the world and the cloud is the enemy. Not a winning strategy, I dont care how easy it is to use or how much it dedupes.
A single NetApp A800 system supports throughput of 25GB/s for sequential reads and 1 million IOPS for
small random reads at sub-500s latencies3
. In addition, what sets A800 apart is its 100GbE4 network
support, which accelerates data movement and also fosters balance in the overall training system,
because the DGX-1 supports 100GbE RDMA for cluster interconnect. The NetApp A700s system
supports multiple 40GbE links to deliver a maximum throughput of 18GB/s.
This must be an old article or an uninformed author. NetApp has the A800 to deal with this competition and does so in ways they could only dream about. Both are real fast but only one has multiple protocol and cloud connectivity. Edge to core to cloud...FTW. https://www.netapp.com/us/media/wp-7267.pdf
Dell/EMC SAN revenue down about 14%, NetApp SAN rev up 13%. NetApp is growing and Dell/EMC is shrinking in many key segments. Other than VMware running in AWS what sort of cloud mobility does any of their stuff have? Dell has product bloat, most people would agree. With all of those products how many of them support SAN and NAS and are cloud enabled and run that same OS on white boxes or in hyperscalers....? none, not one, most of their systems wont even do a couple of those things. How about NVMe??? I could go on but I think you get my point.
Wall Street gambling addicts seem to agree with this sentiment as reflected in their over priced shares. Someday and maybe soon, Wall Street will expect profit and not just a growth and sell strategy. Meanwhile other companies are able to grow and be profitable. The only upside for this stock is when they are sold and it will not be much higher than market IMO. They are fantastic marketers and that is a dual edged sword. It gets customers and Wall Street excited but when you over promise and under deliver it will not get them the results they want. Pure's Flash blade has a few cool architecture features but is very limited in scalability and data mobility from edge and especially to and from the cloud.
It looks like we can no longer call NetApp the under dog. Based on the current share price Wall Street sees NetApp's vision and ability to execute against it. Name any other storage vendor with native data pathways in and out of the cloud like this? They make it easy to get in to the cloud but that also works both ways, sometimes you want to bring it in and avoid or at least minimize the egress taxes... They finally have products and unique functionality to support the data fabric story.
I dont think this comment in the article is true"NetApp is making hay upgrading its base to all-flash FAS. It has no equivalent of Data Domain, Data Protection Suite nor software-defined storage products, and its object stuff appears to be doing OK." To compete with Data Domain, NetApp has Alta Vault cloud caching, native cloud partnerships, and is working on DP Suite to allow single file restore from the cloud. they also have snap/clone/mirror that seamlessly integrates with all the key players for a single pain of glass DP management with actual cloud support. Dell/EMC has no cloud support unless you count VMWare inside of AWS and everyone uses that so it is not unique to them. We all know cloud is a large part of DP and Del/EMC are still in the 90's with their technology.
This looks like either a sign of weakness or a large strategic gamble or both. They cant grow fast enough or save up the money quick enough to do this without taking on additional debt. I'm sure Gartner wont view this as lack of ability to effectively execute on their vision but I sure do.
If you are a large enterprise, I strongly disagree that the cloud will save you any money. In most cases it wont, what it will provide is agility that most in house IT cannot compete with. We are well past the notion of cloud saving you money, the real ROI is in acceleration and time to value.
That is the only cloud thing they have done well. They have purchased quite a few high value native cloud solution providers in the marketing automation and BI space and that is what is keeping their cloud numbers even measurable. This article covers a lot of ground and I cant agree enough with the hubris claim! I used to work there and still own a ton of stock, I want them to succeed but they still dont get it from what I can see.
Pure has no business being top for either leadership or ability to execute. They have no cloud solutions that dont require someone elses tech. Flash Blade is interesting and when it gets a full set of features it will be compelling in a few niche areas but the cost of supporting and engineering your own proprietary hardware will likely be a huge headwind to profitability. What is their marketshare for flash, 3rd or ?, how is that showing ability to execute? the math does not support that, imo.
interesting but nothing innovative. What protocols does it support? block only? what cloud capabilities does it have? Can you snap in and out of AWS, Azure, IBM? Does the storage OS have a white box version? Nobody will get fired for buying this Big Blue product but you certainly wont win any innovation awards either.
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