NetApp Hitz out at critics over the flashy SolidFire buyout deal NetApp co-founder Dave Hitz has blogged about the closing of the Solidfire deal and castrated any misleading bull* about NetApp’s flash strategy. Hitz says he admires Solidfire’s architectural design, writing: “SolidFire’s architectural choices are elegant and made for a reason. (This is the geeky paragraph, so skip on if it …
You might want to take a a look at this man-page for FreeBSD's bhyve hypervisor:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bhyve&sektion=4
Note the sponsors...
And there's this guy at NetApp who's apparently made DataONTAP run on top of above hypervisor:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anishgupta
It (bhyve) now seems to support Windows:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/Windows
So, I guess not much is missing and you could run VMs directly on your NetAPP storage.
David,
I used to work for your company and loved the product and team. In our country a bunch of morons took over and ran the great culture into the ground. I was showed the door after for voting 3 out of 5 in the anonymous employee survey which is the basis of the GPTW ranking.
My regional Manager was so kind to point out that me voting 3 out of 5 vote actually counts negative as far as GPTW is concerned.... A reason was found ... and I had to go.
On the technical side of things I'm really sorry things aren't going so well. Data Ontap was and is a great product, but you created a bunch of conformist idiots with only one product (cDOT) to sell. (cDOt is the answer - so what was the question ?)
The open door/open ears policy has disappeared and non-conformists had to go.
That "no Windscreen" EF-Series system is what keeps you alive. You can thank Tom Georgens for that. I know the Netapp technical geeks hate that EF wasn't "invented here" at Netapp.
The argument that Solid Fire is so great because it cuts corners on HW design is BS.
A few years ago a bunch of Sun engineers ran a ZFS system on a USB hub with Thumb Drives. According to your logic - this must be great architecture.
Anyway - you must have done something right with that snapshot technology back in 1993... I admire that you try to save your company - but maybe your team should stop believing their own lies.
@AC, a bit of residual anger there? I too was a NetApp employee and was let go in the 2008 down-sizing. True NetApp had lost a lot of its culture that made it a fun place to work.
In my 40-year IT vendor side career, I've been thru seven acquisition/mergers, a bankruptcy, and two down-sizings. None of them were fun.
Like virtually every tech company out there, you need to constantly re-invent to survive. NetApp management made some bad choices; the Isreali's and the Indians did not get along and many suffered in the gun-fire.
I still hold quite a few shares in NetApp and have hope that they can stage a come-back. They are survivors.
Let's see what the tech landscape looks like in 2-years... Does NetApps bounce back or not.
time for a reality check folks, why are we giving NetApp another 2 year window when the previous 2 year window they stunk it up and stunk it up bad. NetApp spent 10 years integrating Spinnaker into an OS and by the time it was half ready, the industry didnt care anymore.
I will make a bold prediction. NetApp will continue to tell the market that WAFL is the answer and then suddenly pull the plug on AFF and EF and say Solidfire is king.
NetApp has far too many fan boys who are sucking down on the coolaid pretending everything is sweet while the industry pivots and leaves them to become the next Titanic.
For those with good memories, put your hand up if you were at the Matt Watts roadshow where he told everyone that Flash was dead. My crusty old coffee cup has more credibility my old friend
"Why write twice instead of using RAID? First, it eliminates the performance reduction in degraded mode."
This is such a flippant statement that one wonders if Dave is pulling the author's leg. Seriously. When coupled with efficient write coalescing, a RAID system is *way* more efficient in terms of IO thruput than a cross-node "mirror". As for the comment about degraded mode; complete BS. What happens when you lose a node and then need to resync later? Degraded mode, right?
If this is what passes for technical evaluation and due-diligence at Netapp, I'm very worried.
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