back to article Nimbus Data CEO shoots from the hip at NetApp's SolidFire buy

Nimbus Data CEO Thomas Isakovich thinks NetApp's purchase of SolidFire is its final great mistake. He told us: “SolidFire’s poor density and egregiously high energy consumption violate the very customers they are trying to appeal to: cloud builders that have to pay for data center rack space and power bills. We suspect that …

  1. diskmonkey

    Means little

    In the end right or wrong, the results do speak for themselves. SolidFire got purchased and Nimbus is still going it alone. Not sure how long they will last too. This is an easy bet to state that there is more consolidation in the all flash external array market still to come.

    1. thegreatsatan

      Re: Means little

      going it alone? you mean not selling any product and getting sued by its customers.

      best glassdoor reviews ever.

    2. dikrek
      Boffin

      Re: Means little

      Instead of focusing on the size of nimbus, focus on what the man is actually saying.

      Working for a competitor doesn't automatically render an argument meaningless. Logic is logic.

      It is true that service providers value multiple things:

      - automation

      - ease of use

      - predictability

      But they also value:

      - price/performance

      - rack density

      - low power and cooling requirements.

      Hand-waving away the second set of requirements doesn't make sense.

      A solution that is, best case, 40% usable:raw, and, best case, 4 TIMES less dense than some competitive products (some from the same parent company), grossly violates the second set of SP requirements.

      It is what it is - customers need to carefully consider what's most important to them and act accordingly.

      Thx

      D (Nimble employee, ex NetApp, scribblings at recoverymonkey.org)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Means little

        oh D - are you really going to look for every NetApp related story and pounce/troll? Dont you think there's a grace period after you left them (why they let you is a mystery) when it's kinda uncool to reverse course 180 degrees from being their biggest fan boy to a subtle but persistent hater?

        1. dikrek

          Re: Means little

          I'm the furthest thing from a hater. I just find it interesting that every time someone explains about inefficiencies in the architecture, people complain that it's not important, and "look at all the business benefits".

          It IS true that the people SolidFire is aimed at ALSO care about things like power/space/cooling/cost.

          Ignoring that sort of requirement for that type of business is just silly.

          Attacking people for calling this out just because they work at competitors is probably not very productive.

          Go through every post of mine on The Register. You won't find a single mention of SolidFire when I was at NetApp. Actually there is one, where I thought the competitive material they had vs ONTAP was silly.

          Check my blog too. No mention of it there either. I never pull any articles. It's all there. No mention of the purchase, no glowing article about what kind of problems it solves.

          Now, start thinking about possible correlation. And it's not that I'm an ONTAP bigot. I was involved in the EF and FlashRay projects too, and it's funny how wrong people get the FlashRay story. It was a kickass product. Never given a chance. Out of respect I won't say more.

          BTW - I can always post anonymously. Like most vendor peeps seem to do.

          Or just stop commenting altogether, like my friends advise me to. "Who reads the comments anyway" :)

          Thx

          D

        2. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. JDooley

        Re: Means little

        D - I get that you aren't a fan of SolidFire. I wish we could have talked about that more before you left.

        Respectfully, I disagree with your self-serving list of "things service providers value" list. As someone who spent 6 years working at a service provider, building dedicated and shared VMware environments, and someone who spent years since then working with service providers to create new service offerings and drive revenue, I am confident that there is literally no storage product I've ever worked with, as a customer or a vendor, that comes as close to delivering on everything they want from a storage platform as SolidFire. Unlike other vendors, we didn't start at the low end of the market and work our way up to cater to Enterprise customers, we started at the top and with a product that was purpose-built just for service providers. The results of how we did speak for themselves, and nothing can take that away. There simply isn't a better, more flexible storage platform to help service providers or all kinds turn capital into revenue.

        I wish you'd stuck around longer, I was looking forward to getting to work with you. Instead, I guess we'll keep meeting up in the comment section of El Reg. Have a good night.

        Jeramiah Dooley- SolidFire employee, former VCE SP and Vertical Solutions Team, former Peak 10 Director of Managed Services

        1. dikrek

          Re: Means little

          Hi Jeremiah,

          As someone who, in a previous life, spent time in SPs (Acxiom) and large enterprises (Halliburton, United Airlines) I can tell you that balance is absolutely required in large shops.

          Maybe that's the disconnect. I'm thinking of the potential in multi-PB or even EB deployments.

          Most large SPs want capacity and performance tier differentiation, not just performance QoS and the ability to provision via an API.

          For example, they will charge a lot less for NL-SAS hybrid capacity than SSD-based capacity, partly because it costs them less in the first place, partly because customers expect it to cost less.

          They also have needs for different kinds of density for different kinds of data.

          The $/GB to store something on 10TB low cost spinning disk are a tiny fraction of the costs of storing it in mirrored SSD.

          This means that Service Providers naturally tend to have a variety of tiers instead of just one. Unless they're very very small, in which case a single box is enough. But then again those very small SPs also tend to be very cost-conscious.

          SolidFire has had some success in that industry but the large Service Providers typically have much more than SolidFire. If anything, the percentage of capacity in the typical SP will be less SSD and much more of other stuff, as much as we'd all like that to not be the case :)

          And finally, the overall number of SolidFire customers is very small.

          Percentage-wise many of those customers may be Service Providers, but that doesn't mean significant penetration in that space.

          D out.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meaningless

    Nimbus Data haven't even issued a press release in over 2 years. They are as dead as the proverbial parrot.

  3. RollTide14

    Did someone actually interview him?

    I am hoping this was a Twitter battle and someone didn't actually waste their time interviewing the CEO of a dead no name company.

    Thats like someone interviewing the CEO of Pontiac and tries to throw punches at Tesla

  4. INOV8ER
    Pint

    Insiders view.....

    NTAP Employee here - what you are witnessing is a well planned comeback by fresh new leadership team. What's really important is not public knowledge....yet. This purchase helped NetApp begin to compete after being late to the game. Solid Fire is a top notch company with an incredible product. I had the pleasure of meeting the leadership as well as a few key developers and they are some of the smartest people in the business. What they are working on now will be second to none. The turn around of NetApp has begun. Nimbus only dreams of their product existing in NetApp / Solid Fires customers data centers. I had to look up who Nimbus was as they are not even on the radar. With NetApps existing customer base and Solid Fires penetration into markets that NetApp currently does not operate in can only lead to positive outcomes. Solid Fire will directly benefit from the NetApp channel and sales force. Lastly - NTAP has new fresh leadership in many key roles. This will and has begun making the difference. NetApp will be a new company when it comes out the other side. I wouldn't bet against it.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can someone from NetApp defend

    the claims rather than attack isakovich?

    1. RollTide14

      Re: Can someone from NetApp defend

      I'm a former NetApp employee....go read the comments in this article

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/08/solidfires_flash_density_looks_meagre/

      There are comprises you have to make in order to get certain features/functionality. In order to get all the bells and whistles that SolidFire brings to the table means its very memory intensive. Has nothing to do with inefficiency, has to do with a completely different set of features.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Can someone from NetApp defend

      Calm down Tommy

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not where the value is

    NetApp competitor here and no fan of the Company, technology, or leadership

    .

    The value in the SolidFire buy is around the scale out platform and the Quality of Service. That is real technology that NetApp can use. The issues the Nimbus guy brings up are irrelevant.

    Buying SolidFire and replacing Georgens are the ONLY positive moves I have seen from NetApp in a really long time. Hopefully it is not too late.

    (Then if you look at their recent AFA market share numbers, maybe it is not too late)

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Aww come on guys

    Every pantomime needs a villain - normally a big, camp, overly-theatrical one given to grandiose statements and preposterous put downs but who ultimately ends up with a cream pie in their face and custard down their trousers.

    I give you... Thomas Isakovich!!

  8. r8gdekhayser

    Free Nimbus publicity

    Isakovich just got his company more publicity than it's gotten in a long time. Good move on his part by faking industry relevance. Not sure he deserved the platform however.

    He barks about density but now Netapp's got the 15TB SSD's on AFF. So..if ya need that density, there ya have it. The tradeoff is that you'll be in ONTAP land, which has a great enterprise feature set and it's own scaling features (not like SolidFire of course), but a different feature set and design philosophy than SolidFire. It may be a fit for that high-density case, or perhaps you'd find the SolidFire scalability and guaranteed performance model a better fit despite the "low density" (which is the same "density" as many of the other AFA leaders).

    Each feature/attribute of a storage platform has its own value- and customers will weigh all of these when making their platform decisions. The fact that SolidFire has had such amazing success in the SP market even before they had the Netapp mass behind them, means that these SP's have weighed all the variables and determined SolidFire's platform architecture to best meet their needs and reduce the incremental cost of resources at scale. Is it the best platform for all workloads? Of course not. They never claimed it was.

    BTW full disclosure, I'm with a Netapp partner, who also partners with other storage vendors.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SolidMissFire

    In my (very) limited experience of SF their sales team heavily imply their arrays ease of expandability and QoS settings. Run out of IOPS, put another array in. Run out of capacity put another array in. Have up to 100 units in a single cluster, sounds great until you realise you have to start with 4 nodes (you don't have to but you would) and not many people scale beyond 15 nodes (ask them how many clusters of 15+ nodes there are in production...

    Good technology in theory but the reality in my experience at least (as a consumer) is the numbers just don't add up as nicely as they'd like them to.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Killing a Product != Failing

    At least that's how NetApp thinks about it.

    NetApp SE's and Sales Teams tell customers that NetApp Products allow them to fail fast.

    The whole idea is that "everybody fails", but if you fail fast - you can get on with life and develop a better product etc.

    What's interesting is that NetApp went from the longest fail in history (cDOT) to the shortest fail in history (FlashRay and some other Products)

    So if NetApp killed SolidFire now - it wouldn't be a fail.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Killing a Product != Failing

      If course it would be a fail to kill SolidFire now. They paid almost a billion dollars for it! And for an architecture that attempts to combine the inefficiency of having to store multiple copies of every byte of data with the high cost of flash. I think they only have two copies today, with no RAID/erasure coding, which is playing with fire. One node goes out, and any unrecoverable SSD bit error could cause data loss. Top it off with a fixed 4K block size, and you have an architecture prime for a competitive take-out. We shall see if NetApp ever even realizes a billion in revenue from Solidfire, let alone a billion in profit.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Snapshot company

    All of NetApp's success was built on one killer feature - SnapShots- which addressed a "spinning disk" problem.

    There have been a lot of cool features which were built ontop of Snapshots, but that's incremental innovation.

    Not much happened at NetApp after Snapshots - and anything that looked promising got killed off by the Ontap lobby, which became the cDOT lobby.

    Flash arrived and NetApp did what everybody did. They sold Flash Shelves to customers that previously bought an "under-sized" solution. That was a hay fire. Hot and bright, but short.

    In the meantime smaller players build AFA's. NetApp tried too but failed.

    So they bought a Flash Company (Solid fire) - hoping they wouldn't miss the train.

    Now pay me millions of dollars to come up with this brilliant "Strategy".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Snapshot company

      If you think NetApp is only a "snapshot company" and that their all-flash array is just "flash shelves" and that the SF purchase was just to fill "a flash gap" then I don't think you've done your homework.

      Was FlashRay a failure? As far as going to market, yes. But the lessons learned and technology developed was not wasted.

      I don't think hitting #2 in market share for flash, with AFF being the largest chunk of that share, is "missing the train," but cognitive dissonance sometimes overrules what's in front of your face, I guess,

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Snapshot company

        AFF = All Flash FAS

        So the largest chunk of NetApp's Flash market share is just a FAS with Flash Shelves.

        ( + perfomrmance improvements for flash )

        I'm sure you have rehearsed the pre-canned marketing stories how E-Series, FAS and Solid Fire all address a particular customer need. That's despite telling customers for twenty years that the swiss army knife can do everything in one box whereas competitors need three separate product lines.

        I'm sure NetApp will integrate the lessons learned with Flashray just as fast as it did learn the lessons from its Spinaker aquisition.

        As far as SolidFire is concerned - it just wasn't invented here - and that's a cultural problem.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Snapshot company

          A FAS with Flash shelves that has been optimized for flash and keeps up with/exceeds the performance of the "built from the ground up" systems.

          Again, please do your homework rather than parroting FUD talking points.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Snapshot company

            "A FAS with Flash shelves that has been optimized for flash and keeps up with/exceeds the performance of the "built from the ground up" systems.

            Again, please do your homework rather than parroting FUD talking points."

            Really, so why attempt to build a AFA from scratch and then buy one when that spectacularly fails. My somewhat outdated understanding of CDOT also seems to recall that QoS was part of the OS so then why go out and buy a really poor AFA business when you already have the capability that the whole premise of this purchase was built upon.

            NetApp had a good penetration into the MSP market so again why buy a business that had far lower penetration into a market in which it was doing reasonably well. How much MSP revenue did SF have, in fact how much is the entire SF revenue? I would suggest tiny by comparison.

            The whole purchase simply makes no sense and yet again shows that NotApp has zero ability to acquire well and just seems to follow its own agenda and not what customers are asking for. Its akin to suffering a water shortage and panic buying salt.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Snapshot company

        This week you like what the Analysts say and take it as gospel. Next week you disagree with the analysts and criticise their methods.

        It's indeed a bit hard to stay impartial when you've got to sell whatever is in the bag and your livelihood depends on it.

        I have worked for several Storage Vendors including NetApp. Sometimes there's a good product in the bag and sometimes a bad one. Even though a product was bad they'd still try to sell it.

        Unlike most other areas in IT - storage is full of spin, snake oil and deliberate confusion.

    2. bitpushr

      Re: Snapshot company

      I would argue that being the first multiprotocol NAS platform was innovative. And that being the first multiprotocol NAS + SAN platform was innovative. And that being the first platform to offer dedupe on primary storage was innovative. And that being the first platform to use SATA drives on primary storage was innovative. And...

      I work for NetApp, and I'll be one of the first to criticize something, but we've hardly rested on our collective laurels since coming up with snapshots.

  12. Androgynous Cow Herd

    Valuable insight from Tom...

    Wouldn't you agree that SolidFire's real mistake was not going with a green logo? That was obviously their first great blunder.

    Big kisses from your good friends at Nimble...glad to hear you were able to pull away from fielding support calls.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nimbus?

    They still in business?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nimbus?

      I understand they are merging withX-IO to consolidate batsh!t crazy C level execs onto single super awesome platform that will do anything you can imagine for free in the next release.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nimbus?

        XIO? I thought Nimbus would become the 3rd boat anchor at Pivot 3!

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So, now years after this article published - what have we learned about NetApp, Solidfire, and Nimbus?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      SolidFire is dead - so that's that

      NetApp shut down SolidFire so that's what we've learned - a massive loss/write-off.

      https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/netapp_layoffs_solidfire/

      NetApp's total revenue with SolidFire was less than half the price NetApp paid to acquire it.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like