NetApp products havent had quality peers for years, but thats changing, and NetApp is going to have to start competing on price.

It cant keep charging $250,000 + $3k support contract for a few terabytes of high-availability data and sell the same number of units - a large portion of their market can get more mileage of a system for 1/10th the price but a little more sysadmin babysitting.

They are still the best and an easy choice for the deep pockets.

"and NetApp is going to have to start competing on price."

seth,

It is Content which rules the Game and that is the Competition Space which will pay Quality and Continuity of Supply, ITs Premium dDividend.

Seth is spot on: NetApp has had a huge pile of innovative products, but as EMC, IBM, and HP start to emulate much of their functionality this innovation advantage is decreasing.

NetApp needs to get back onto the innovation curve or else start cutting prices!

How true!

Small companies can get a linksys box for a few hundred quids and 4TB of raw space. True, it's not NetApps, but 2 of those in mirror still cost significantly less then a FAS.

And let's not forget that with linux you can still build a decent box (and you can keep it well mirrored on the network) with a lot of terabytes to spare if you were to use a tower form.

BTW, after about 10/12 U of rented space and relative energy, you are better off getting a full rack, so space is not a premium comodity anymore nowadays in a data centre. Even less in an office environment where you can rack things up without the use of expensive rack kits.