back to article NetApp veep: 'We've shifted 750,000 all-flash arrays'. Er, really?

There has been a sea change in the FlashRay project, NetApp's ground-up all-flash array product development, with execs leaving and the project being absorbed into the overall ONTAP organisation. So we interviewed George Kurian, NetApp's product operations EVP, to find out about FlashRay's status and positioning, and NetApp's …

  1. K
    Big Brother

    His eye's tell it all

    ... they're lying!

    1. klaxhu

      Re: His eye's tell it all

      lol ....u don't need his eyes to realise that.

      seriously? 750.000 flash arrays already shipped? i doubt if they even have 7,5 units shipped, let alone 75,750 or MORE!! this is hilarious ...

      when pure, xtremio, 3par and others are kicking netapp out of most of established accounts, they claim they are doing better than ever.

      this article is at least funny ...if not hilarious

      what is strange, is the fact that CM's acid comments are missing ...smells fishy Chris!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: His eye's tell it all

        The 750,000 number is a reference to the E-series systems that have been shipped. The EF architecture is based on E-series with a couple of tweaks.

        So what he is really saying is that "I have a proven, mature platform". This is statement not to be underestimated especially by those who are running mission critical, revenue generating applications.

  2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Coming Soon...

    CEO sells a shed load of NetApp shares.

    then a wee while later

    Netapp files for Chapter 11

    SOP for a good number of US companies IMHO.

  3. ByteMe

    Zoom in please!

    Could you please provide a photo that is closer to George's face? I can't quite count all the eyelashes or see all the plaque on his teeth.

    1. Michael Strorm Silver badge

      Heeeeeeeeeere's Reggie!

      The crop of his face on the front page was already a bit strange. The first proper image was pretty close-up and having a zoomed-in duplicate further down is plain weird.

      If you're going to do this, at least go the whole hog and have a third, fourth and possibly fifth zoomed repetition until we're staring so deeply into his pupils that we can see his soul.

      Either that, or give your picture picture editor some time off to chill out before his overworked, frazzled brain starts replacing every image with "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We are as excited... really?

    "We are as excited today about FlashRay as we have ever been. However, we also believe that FlashRay is not required for us to compete effectively in the flash market today, it will eventually help customers deploy flash more widely in the future"...

    Translation, IF we'll be able to fix it, it will probably entar the AFA market!!!

  5. M. B.

    Misleading, but not incorrect

    The EF system is one of the most proven *platforms*...

    The EF system "platform" is the same as the old Engenio product, so technically he may be correct but highly misleading.

    There are more than 750,000 LSI Engenio arrays, IBM DS-series, Dell PowerVault systems, NetApp E and EF series, I think even Cray used the "platform" for some of their storage products. I don't see THAT as a stretch as a lot of folks bought into that platform in one form or another.

    But as far as actual EF-series specific arrays shipped? I doubt they've hit 10,000. Didn't they only just recently offer dual-controller systems?

  6. dikrek
    Happy

    Allow me to clarify...

    Hi all, Dimitris from NetApp here (http://recoverymonkey.org). So much hate and misinformation. And so many people hiding behind the anonymity the Internet provides... man up and disclose your name and affiliation, otherwise your comments are like tears in the rain.

    So...

    Mr. "klaxhu": The 750,000 number is actually close to 1 million systems now. I need to have words with the people that provided an old number, but that's not all flash units (the article actually clarifies that at the end). But, as someone rightly pointed, it's a highly mature platform with extra tweaks for flash.

    Mr. "Anonymous Coward": Entering the AFA market: we've been in it firmly... and winning, especially when it comes to performance. Maybe even against the company you represent/like.

    Mr. "M.B": The EF always was available as a dual controller system.

    EF has utterly crushed the competition in multiple bakeoffs in both performance and reliability, and especially consistently low latency. Excellent for a tactical deployment, especially in an environment where low latency is key - where it destroys the competitors that have to waste cycles doing garbage cleanup, compression and dedupe.

    All-Flash FAS has all the features, tighter application integration than any competitor, and plugs right into the extremely rich ONTAP ecosystem, with live data migration between all-flash cluster nodes and ones with other media types. A great choice for a more strategic deployment.

    NetApp is extremely well positioned for Flash today and in the future.

    Thx

    D

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Allow me to clarify...

      "And so many people hiding behind the anonymity the Internet provides."

      Yep. Deal with it.

    3. Dave Hilling

      Re: Allow me to clarify...

      Ill respond to a few of Dimitris comments... under what circumstances did the EF win?? We tested the first models out it was the slowest of any of the all flash arrays we tried in most of our tests(not that it was really slow). Now the new ones may be better, but in every test we threw at it it was usually close to the bottom other than some of the sequential tests where IBM lost out at the time due to only having 4 FC ports (new IBM ones have 8 I believe)

      I like the E-Series I really do we have at over 10 of them all running 2TB drives, but we didnt buy them for flash arrays. Too expensive, support costs were too high and they were fast but others were faster, cheaper, and easier to setup and maintain(not that the e series are bad either compared to others).

      FAS we got rid of all those too for pretty much the same reasons found faster cheaper systems.

      1. dikrek

        Re: Allow me to clarify...

        Hi Dave,

        What tests did you run? We typically crush arrays that do inline dedupe and compression, as long as the test uses realistic data.

        There are some important considerations if one uses certain tests with certain arrays.

        http://bit.ly/1bKLZjT

        For what it's worth, the current EF560 is more than 2x the speed of the 540 in many aspects.

        Thx

        D

  7. Lynrd

    Disclosure: Nimble Storage guy here.

    My grandmother is also "Highly Mature" - that doesn't mean I want her driving my Porsche. I don't envy your position, Dmitri, ONTAP is a good technology with a very good story but was designed to work with spinning media -truly integrating and optimizing Flash into that structure is really not feasible due to the different internal nature of the media - if it took ten years to figure out how to make C-mode work, re-architecting WAFL to accept a Flash style page size will just never happen, so you need a different platform. So, then you have these other two things - one a future that might appear late to market, the other a spindle bound dinosaur with an extremely limited feature set.

    Lots of good folks from Sunnyvale are finding a nice new place to work in San Jose. Let me know if you're interested in learning more.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Well the opposite can be True. It's impossible for a 5yr old to act like a 20 yr old...or drive a Porcshe...

    2. dikrek
      Stop

      Really?

      Nimble, really? You don't even have an all-flash product. And, if anything, one can claim your product is optimized to work with SATA HDDs, not even all types of HDDs, let alone SSDs. See where claims lead to?

      You're focusing on ONTAP as is Nimble's idiom, but we have EF and ONTAP both. Mature platforms, both. Both not originally designed for flash media since it didn't exist back then. Both crazy fast with flash today.

      Guess what... It's all code. Code can be changed. And it has. There is this type of creature, you see, called a developer... we have many, many of them :)

      Witness the super high performance numbers produced by products that all were "originally" designed for spinning disk. NetApp, HDS, HP - all have great performance with SSDs.

      And, if anything, one can argue that ONTAP is more friendly to SSDs than most architectures out there. By intention? Not really - let's call it a happy accident. But if you understand ONTAP internals is is clear that the core of it has nothing to do with spinning rust at all and it's all about data management.

      Last I checked, we are in this business to solve customer problems.

      And please spare me the "will never happen" arguments. I can make similar ones about your company but I will take the high road. Plus it smells a bit like roadmap-revealing bait, which I won't take.

      Thx

      D

    3. oli_from_germany

      Three times I saw Nimble in my Accounts, lost two times, one is pending

      1: they cut the price in halves just with their final offer, discounts were already low. No Idea how they generate revenue this way - and customers going with this are not my favourites (revenues pay employees, replacement parts logistics, back office, service guys and so on)

      2: they offered synchronous mirror "just like Metro Cluster" but available in 2016 “I swear" - with no additional costs now and later. First they sold a product that does not even exists, second I still wonder how they generate revenue (see 1:) - sounds more like getting streets attention amongst all the other flash-microsecond-you-need-only-that-one-trick-pony-shacks

      3: they insisted so much on millisecond write latency at a prospect that they forgot to listen to customers read-intensive environment. The IT guy later told us that this was ridicoulous and a strategic story was missing completely - there was always a u-turn to the pony.

      And by the way reading through Nimbles Datasheet at

      http://info.nimblestorage.com/rs/nimblestorage/images/nimblestorage_technology_overview.pdf

      it shows all Netapp Technologies, well maybe only a 1/256th of them but all well known, absolutely nothing special.

      No need to be scared for me, Nimble.

      Disclosure: Netapp Systems Engineer and proud of it :-)

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The story of ONTAP made for spinning media popups every now and then - and it's funny everytime, since it seems that those guys didn't even bother to find out how ONTAP and WAFL actually works.

      http://community.netapp.com/t5/Tech-OnTap-Articles/All-Flash-FAS-A-Deep-Dive/ta-p/87211

      And it's even funnier when these claims come from company who doesn't even have AFA.

    5. eb2015

      Uh, Nimble really should not be bragging at this point. You sell Whitebox'd OEM solutions that are not Active / Active arrays. That do not do snapshots. Sure I'll bite it took us ten years to get Spinnaker to work with OnTap. Which now allows us to scale up or out more than any Nimble Offering. Let's also not forget we offer MultiProtocol, Nimble, yeah not so much.

  8. Lynrd

    Sales Engineer is a great job!

    I think what you meant to say above was that Nimble does not have a FLASH ONLY device -which is true. We think keeping snapshots on the most expensive storage possible is not an awesome idea when they can be kept more efficiently on big, fat, cheap 7200 RPM platters. To a large degree, the same should be said of any data not currently "hot for the application"

    Most of the rest of the comments are vitriolic and maybe bit confusing - ONTAP and WAFL handle data very well, but the basic file system underpinnings are built for spinning media. To change those parameters would not be trivial, and they could easily turn into tremendous potential for data loss to migrate to a flash optimized architecture. After all the 7-mode/C-mode pain, do your think your customers would welcome another "All we have to do is reinitialize the array" story.?

    Then again, you may be right. EMC still seems to selling XTremeIO after all...

    But if you think that E-series and flash only is the way to go, you might want to Google "Nimble Adaptive Flash Challenge". Nimble will give your customers and prospects an Apple Watch just to evaluate our Adaptive Flash approach side by side against ANY Flash Only player.

    And in closing, I never meant to imply that you or anyone at NTAP were scared - I just said that I would not want to be in your position. Offer is open if you;re in the Bay Area and want to learn more about Nimble. I'll even buy lunch - I have been eating yours quite a bit lately.

    1. oli_from_germany
      Coat

      Re: Sales Engineer is a great job!

      Sales Engineer IS a great job - at Netapp :-) I have many solutions to real business challenges, many stories to tell :-)

      But back to the matter:

      "ONTAP and WAFL handle data very well, but the basic file system underpinnings are built for spinning media." - Yes - and why is this bad? Most of our customers Data is till located on spinning media. And most your customers Data is there too I assume - derived from your technology: SSDs are only day-fresh accelerator, spinning media for longterm storage. And your CASL is not optimized for the lion's share of your customers data? Ai-ai-ai...

      "We think keeping snapshots on the most expensive storage possible is not an awesome idea when they can be kept more efficiently on big, fat, cheap 7200 RPM platters." - Totally agree - this is why we keep Snapshots with a short retention locally (and not on SSD as you obviously assume). But we drove this one important step further many years ago: we replicate old snapshots to smaller, larger or even systems, different Disks (typically large SATA, happy with SSD-topping) or also single controllers (with 5x9 affordable service) for longtime-retention. This is what WE can and no one else. And this is a full-backup of all your data, every 30 Minutes replicated 20 km away and kept there for 6 month up to ~ a year - typical commercial customer setup. Sorry for boring you but again I need to mention that all replicated Snapshots on the target system(s) can still be used for restore, test/dev/forensincs and, and, and...

      Bringing this to customers attention let them put the millisecond blabla aside typically because this is relevant, business process supporting functionality :-)

      One last thing: you already drive a Porsche? I already doubted the generation of revenue before. What do the Investors say about that? Burning capital that way is maybe a shortterm business-model...

      Have a nice weekend

      from Germany

  9. MityDK
    FAIL

    Simply put, NetApp hasn't sold 750,000 EF Arrays. The EF platform may have been sold that many times over the decades of it's existence through many different companies, but for NetApp to say that is simply false. And no amount of spin is going to polish up the turd that is NetApp's current flash story, be it all flash FAS with ONTAP, EF series with Santricity, or Flash Ray with Mars. It only looks good compared to Hitachi or EMC's legacy platforms, not against any of the new vendors.

    1. mtuber

      Pure Storage Guy

      When you post, it's always good to disclose your affiliation.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What the investors say about that....

    Hey Germany,

    Here's what investors have to say about it:

    http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/03/23/emc-netapp-piper-cuts-to-hold-on-nimble-cloud-competition/

    Cheers,

    A US Nimble Employee

  11. eb2015

    Software Based Block on Write.

    To most of the posters up here hating on NetApp, I find the comments about getting OnTap to work with Flash, quite amusing. You all do realize the OnTap and the WAFL FS is a software based block on write system, which means its abstraction can bound many types of storage technology without really forking the kernel so much. The argument about OnTap not handling flash is moot, especially when you consider we released All Flash FAS heads, and we have been selling the EF line of storage for over two years now. Pick on Flash Ray all you want, the fact is we are already knocking on the johnny come lately of the Flash storage world. and for those of you whom think spinning media is just going to disappear like a fart in the wind, you need to pay a visit to your local data center and see the amounts of spinning disk still out there. No smart CIO is going to squash an Enterprise level storage subsystem because some hot in the pants IOPS marketing firm says hey we can compress and dedup all your data at almost 1/8 of the cost, and by the way unannounced you will take a hit on your writes due to read scheduling for the Flash OS systems (Purity, looking at you...). But yeah sure, pick on the company that turned the industry on its head by giving you multi protocol, Unified Architecture (one box many software based functions) Snapshots that were not copy on write (EMC), deduplication, etc... We will still be around...

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