NetApp sings to Solidfire: All I want for Christmas is buying you NetApp is buying SolidFire to get scale-out all-flash arrays for cloud provider-like use cases – the sort of use cases that are closed to NetApp's all-flash E-Series and ONTAP systems. The acquisition was rumored this month, and had a $1.2bn price tag attached to it. NetApp is paying $870m in cash for SolidFire, a move …
Feed the troll I guess. This simply validates that FlashRay was a mistake. AFF and cDOT are still excellent products in their market segments. Good to see NetApp isn't too hardheaded to change direction when they fail.
All in all, a good thing for the market if SolidFire is a good product since it will now have financial and distribution legs to keep progressing. I haven't had personal experience with it.
and just like that all the NetApp claims about flash are about to change. Lets remember a few though because they are fun:
1) What? Flash? It's just a media. No bid deal. Remember when we went from SAS to SATA? It's the same thing. Don't worry about it.
2) Listen; all you need to do is stick some SSDs into a FAS system and it'll still be much faster than you'll even need
3) We've incorporated "future" flash ray innovations to All FAS Flash but we're not going to tell exactly which ones so we don't spoil the surprise.
4) All Flash FAS innovations (code for: we made ONTAP get out of its own way a little bit)
4) 3.8 TB 3D-NAND SSD. ONTAP can use them. Other competitors can't because they have fixed capacity/memory ratios and metadata is a problem for them. SolidFire anyone? 4k anyone?
5) Look how fast the EF is
6) 3X Guarantee with AFF vs traditional arrays using all disk; We get to review how much disk...just in case there's a boatload of wide stripped 15k SAS and we end up looking like Steve Harvey
7) Look how fast the EF is
8) Look All FAS Flash inline deduplication. What? Ummm, what? no we recommend it for VDI only
9) Flash Ray? What Flash Ray? Innovations? All Flash FAS? What are you talking about?
10) NetApp announces the acquisition of SolidFire
Clearly someone has had ENOUGH
Consolidation?
Good question. Tintri, Nimble, Tegile, Pure etc have technology that is not remarkable, not differentiating, not unique, if we're brutally honest. HP, Dell, EMC and now NetApp has product that offers solutions in these gaps.
Other than Cisco - without a storage offering - who is going to buy any of these companies?
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