Forget Disk Arrays Software Defined is the Next Big Thing
The days of physical disk arrays sold by the big guys [EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp, HDS, Dell, ...] are numbered. The direction in the market is software defined; make your own array on cheap JBOD; vmware is doing it for ESX; but NetApp could easily do it for any hypervisor or OS that they already support.
NetApp pioneered RAID-6 with RAID-DP. RAID-DP is great insurance for JBOD arrays.
NetApp needs to monitize their investment in ONTAP and release the virtual verison thier engineers use to develop the next releases of ONTAP.
Amazon and Google do it; and a lot of my customers are moving in that direction.
NetApp has a great kit in ONTAP - would love to sell it as software defined sans the hardware.
The purchase of another disk array vendor is not going to move the revenue dial; NetApp could be the next big thing in sofware defined.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
