Hang on, lads. I've got a great idea, says NetApp as it teeters on the edge NetApp revenues are not exactly flourishing, and the storage biz admits it's facing a decline. As the company reveals its end-of-year figures, will the cloud finish off NetApp, or give it a chance to really boost sales? Here are the figures [PDF] for fiscal 2014, ended 25 April: NetApp quarterly revenues 4th quarter, …
...didn't do a very good job with the N-series. I had one and the support was miserable. 140TB in Production with top support and they wouldn't help with a failed ONTAP update after hours, hardware support only. They could never get the V-series license to work with their own DS4300 arrays (we had two of those as well). After a trio of massive failures (complete outages requiring the reboot of the entire storage stack) we were stuck with a bill for native disk shelves to replace the capacity of the DS4300's we couldn't use as advertised. Our account manager was kind enough to offer us a business card with "Sorry!" written on it.
The moment things started going to sh!t, IBM was in pushing the V7000, with no interest in trying to remediate the issues with the N-series. It was one of those things that you would have to remind salespeople of "You know you sell N-series, right?". The DS stuff would only get pushed to the smallest businesses, now with the V3700 pulling in the bottom end there is little point to continuing the relationship I suspect.
The brand recognition may have been nice (I was told IBM will sell the first one, then NetApp will sell all the rest) but I don't think they need it any more, to be honest. Not that it will help them, but I don't think they should be expecting much from IBM any more at this point.
Yeah, the support situation never really worked out all that well between NetApp and IBM. IBM could service the hardware well, actually NetApp outsources most of their break fix work to IBM for their own branded arrays too, but any higher level NetApp software bugs required a call to NetApp level three and engineering... so there was a go between.
IBM also rebranded LSI, now NetApp, Engenio... DS3,4,5. That is all being replaced by V3700, V5000 and V7000. Engenio is long in the tooth. IBM needed to do something.... It also doesn't make much sense for IBM to re-brand storage when they can build their own, distributor margins vs. inventor margins.
Amazon already have NetApp storage attached to their cloud in the building next door and fibre connected. Anyone close to NetApp have known the software split was on the cards for quite a while, partly to fit in to Azure as well, although they are taking a maddeningly long time to finish it. With project shift I suspect it would be a very popular service too, allowing very rapid moves into the cloud.
Amazon never would use NetApp storage. Customers, on the other hand, very much like the software features of NetApp for backup and replication, as well as the ability to change disk formats from VMDK to native LUN to VHD and back to VMDK without that annoying time delay seen with other technologies (which all copy/move the data). The ability to snap mirror your local data to the cloud is a very big opportunity too, and since NetApp are one of the few who have real experience using primary storage as backup they are ideally placed to make some cash here. Although other vendors can do primary storage backup, very few of them actually have customers doing this - HP and EMC for instance prefer to sell you a replicated D2D system so you can have 4 copies of your data rather than just two the NetApp way.
Netapp went toe to toe with EMC for DataDomain a few years ago which surely shows they agree dedicated backup infrastructure is a good idea. Being pretty much a one product company they won't want to leave money on the table for others, so their primary storage ends up also doing backup. If they had a decent alternative they'd be informing anyone who would listen how backup to primary storage is bad / uneconomical.
Netapp is a dinosaur, it's not that people are going to the cloud, its that they are buying better disk shelf's. Nimble, Pure... Netapp? That's so 2004. They missed it and will take a hit for it. Just like EMC, can they recover? Maybe, but they will always have business from people who don't want better.
"Apparently there are a lot of "stupid" people out there waiting to be "educated" on how to bet their multi-million and billion $ businesses on 20 dollar storage tonka toys.."
Yeah, that's what EMC said about NetApp a few years ago.
EMC and company are finally getting on their NAS game, but the larger problem they have is that NAS storage is probably the most amenable workload to send to the cloud providers.
"Georgens was very pleased with NetApp's flash portfolio; some 18PB of flash were shipped in the last quarter. He said: "I'll just state it flat out. I would not trade the flash portfolio of NetApp with the flash portfolio of any other company."
Likely because no other company would want to make that trade with them... but, still, he's not trading.
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This is my 12th year at NetApp and if I learned one thing over the years is that going with the flow and subscribing to various well intended (in some cases) pundit beliefs is, in most cases, the wrong thing to do because in the end the masses are generally on the wrong side of the fence. I've also learned that hype is not necessarily where true success lies. Over the years, at netapp, we have been told that:
1) Our larger competitors will bury us. That of course has yet to materialize and the company has grown from 1200 employees when I joined to 12,000+ now
2) We were told that we couldn't implement and find success with block protocols because we started with NAS and It was a naughty thing. Today netapp's block protocol business is almost on par with NAS.
3) We were told that deduplication on primary data is a terrible thing and nobody in their right mind would want to do that. Today, almost every new array in the market offers dedupe or compression. In fact, for some it's their value-add, the secret-sauce and the cure to all Data Center ills.
4) We were told, in 2009, that without Data Domain, NetApp wouldn't be able to grow at all. Netapp continued growing for the next 4 years.
5) We were told that server virtualization was bad for netapp, especially since EMC had bought VMware. We embraced server virtualization and have continued to reap the rewards the last 10 years.
6) We were told that because we rejected the notion of Automated Storage Tiering, in the sense of what it means to some of our competitors, it will severely affect us because we, instead, embraced Caching. Needless to say, these days we see more cache based approaches than AST in the market.
7) We were told that our Converged stack (FlexPod) with Cisco would be a #fail because it was a "reference architecture" not a product with a SKU etc etc etc...FlexPod has been breaking revenue records for us and you can see the growth numbers published by IDC
We are now saying, that we embrace the cloud, we don't want to become cloud providers, but we much rather enable our customers that want to leverage it by making it very easy for them to get data ON and OFF our platforms while at the same time enable them to keep the same processes and procedures they are use to in their private clouds. What's so crazy about this?
We also hear a lot things about Flash and how ontap is "naughty" for flash. Some of the comments are due to lack of education and that's our fault. Others comments are ill intentioned. Usually you can tell which is which. So lets level set here. Most if not all Flash Arrays have some fundamental things in common
1) The usually have a file system under the covers. So does ONTAP. It's called WAFL.
2) Some write in 4k blocks. So does WAFL
3) They don't do in place writes. ONTAP doesn't do in place writes.
4) They all do write coalescing...ONTAP does this since 1992
5) Some use RoW snapshots...ONTAP has been doing this since 1992!
6) Most offer storage efficiency techniques...so does ONTAP
So, if these new systems leverage fundamentally similar architectural concepts why is it that they are called "innovative" and ONTAP which has leveraged these techniques since 1992 is not? Is it because of inline compression (hold that thought on ONTAP) and dedupe? Is that the value add? The notion that ONTAP can handle SSDs is absurd and we are showing this to our customers.
For customers reading this, please talk to your NetApp Flash specialists. For all others keep FUDing. It's a great opportunity for us to start conversations with those who are really interested.
Sorry for the long post, but I feel while there are some well intentioned folks on these boards that truly want to learn, there's also a lot of "poison" to the point that if were to give out gold we'd still get blamed for it.
Cheers
Disclosure: A long time NetApp employee working at a truly great and ethical company
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