NetApp kills off StoreVault It always was a mystery why hotshot channel head Leonard Iventosch suddenly left NetApp last summer. Perhaps this sheds some light, though - NetApp has just announced the end of life for its main SME channel product, the S Family, formerly known as StoreVault. Users are complaining of being shafted. StoreVault, a NetApp …
We bought five of these S550 StoreVault boxes last year. They were great at first. Then we discovered the GUI wasn't really complete - there were features and options which did not do anything. Calls into tech support confirmed this as we were directed to use a command line interface to manage the box instead. Even the tech support guy confirmed the StoreVault code was incomplete.
Thirty days later....the "free initial support ran out". Stupid me for thinking a piece of hardware came with at least a year of software updates. It didn't help that CDW admitted to forgetting to offer support....and we were in a new budget cycle with no additional $$$ to spend. Y'all know how that goes...
We all live in a tech world and understand that 'poo happens'. It is one thing to market & release a lousy product. It is something else to tell customers who purchased said product that they need to buy a contract before they can get a fix (*if* one is ever released). Seeing this DOA announcement, I am glad we didn't pony up the $$$ to by support. Burned once, but not twice.
Point being, we were shafted by NetApp / StoveVault. Storage growth is what....50% year over year?? Guess who *WILL NOT* get an RFP the next time we need to add disk.
All part of NetApp's long term strategy of concentrating on competing with EMC and not taking profit at doing what their good at.
On the other hand, the quote of "Its unacceptable to not support windows 2008 domains and have StoreVault manager running on Vista" - Hell I'd want to get out of any market that thought like that too.
Mines the one with the SFP/SFP patch leads in the pocket
then you should expect to be shafted. Eventually.
It's the same with any lock in tech such as the various DRM systems (M$ PlaysForSure, I'm looking at you here). Things are fine until Corporation X decides they aren't making enough money on the product at which point you are left out in the cold with nowhere to go.
People need to beware when buying appliances. For the very reason they are "simple" they also have a very limited future. Plan on getting exactly what you get and nothing more. Personally, that's fine for something <$100 like a WAP or similar but once I exceed that forget it. If you wanted extensibility you built a lightweight Linux/Samba box. Yeah, it took a little more research but it was extensible forever.
Every time I ever looked at NetApp's stuff it looked overpriced and under featured.
Right this way, sir!
"The engineering decisions made by the NAS market leaders reflect this thinking, as they continue to peddle grossly undersized DRAM configurations -- like NetApp's top-of-the-line FAS6080 and its meager maximum of 32GB of DRAM per head! (By contrast, our Sun Storage 7410 has up to 128GB of DRAM -- and for a fraction of the price, I hasten to add.) And it is of no surprise that none of the entrenched players conceived of the hybrid storage pool; SPEC SFS does little to reward cache, so why focus on it? (Aside from the fact that it delivers much faster systems, of course!)..."
http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/eulogy_for_a_benchmark
I am so tired of these companies and their "Commitment". NetApps proves they are no better than any of the others. They sell the hell out of this line of product, make enormous profits at the expense of their customers. They promise a roadmap and a scalability, and then dump on the customer.
Anyone who has this product and buys from NetApps again, deserves what they get.
Paul Clifford
Davenport Group
www.davenportgroup.com
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