NetApp revenues and profits decline again despite positive spin Despite its CEO saying NetApp was moving forward with clarity and speed in the data-powered digital era, NetApp recorded lower revenues and profits on the annual compare for its second fiscal 2016 quarter, ended October 20. Same old, same old. Revenues for the quarter were $1.45bn, six per cent down on the year-ago quarter’s $ …
With EMC now being owned by Dell, Dell having nothing useful in their old portfolio, and HP having only performance to brag about I wouldn't be surprised to see NetApp climb in market share over the coming years just because they have such mature software surrounding the storage. There really are unique things they can do that the other vendors can't, like Shift, or the strong integrated backup suite. I didn't mention IBM because people don't tend to buy IBM storage because of choice, there's usually some other driver. Now that flash has pretty much levelled the performance playing field software is the only differentiator and from what I can see none of the other vendors have really pushed into that area the way NetApp has. Sure, they tick the boxes, but I've never seen the software in use while NetApp customers tend to use the full stack.
That said, cloud is going to trounce the lot of them shortly, even with the NetApp cloud integrated features I don't think they'll get very far when workloads become native to public cloud so if they can even keep revenue flat I'll be amazed.
As a consultant I have seen the opposite in the field. Our customers buy Netapp because they already have it or they get a promotional price.
I love the cluster mode cli but the transition is expensive and it is not an easy learning curve.
Most importantly to your point though, no IT shop seems to have the dedicated man hours for a dedicated storage admin let alone architect to implimentation let alone managed the advanced snap features, replication, dedupelication. Yes in theory all of those are easy to setup... but there is always a learning curve along with care and feeding to leverage advanced features... then there is the dreaded Netapp scheduling conflicts that must be carefully managed or you risk dragging performance to a crawl.
Lately QA has not been very good on new releases eitheir.
If Netapp customers cannot afford to run advanced features then they might as well buy the cheapest competitor.
Netapp still does not have a good option vs Nutanix which is my current favorite platform.
I'm also a consultant and find the cDOT transition fairly trivial these days. The "advanced snap features" are all intuitive and straightforward, much more so than a tape based backup product which requires a backup specialist. SnapManager can be managed by the correct admin (DBA for SQL, VM bod for virtualisation etc.) so no new learning necessary after set up. Given that the bundle of software includes unlimited everything I don't see how you think people can't afford it.
NetApp doesn't need a good option to compete against Nutanix - Nutanix need something to compete with NetApp. Nutanix is not capable of performing at the same time as maintaining data consistency it's one or the other. If you didn't know that then it explains why you like Nutanix - their fans usually lack storage experience.
"Nutanix is not capable of performing at the same time as maintaining data consistency it's one or the other. If you didn't know that then it explains why you like Nutanix - their fans usually lack storage experience"
Nope. I am not a consultant (I work in the performance team at Nutanix, and previously performed the same role at NetApp). I can categorically tell you that Nutanix has no problem maintaining consistency and performance.
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Curious, one of your consultants confirmed that when consistency is a requirement, for instance on a database, the software must write to multiple nodes to non-volatile storage which adds latency when compared to traditional SAN with multiple controllers which have coherent caches. The performance figures usually quoted are those when consistency is switched off, for instance in a VDI environment where data consistency isn't such a big issue.
Have you since changed the laws of physics to reduce this round trip and multiple write latency? HP would love to know as the Lefthand has the exact same issue...
The amount of senior execs departing says it all. At least Tom Georgens bought NetApp a life boat in the form of The LSI dumb array.
It's the dumb array coming to the rescue because the smart "I can do it all clustered system" didn't live up to expectations.
The senior execs can afford to leave while the ordinary employees have to stay on the sinking ship.
Netapp is the Costa Concordia of the Storage Industry.
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