NetApp - Dave's Blog

Oracle is the “Crazy Ivan” of the IT Industry

In The Hunt for Red October, Sean Connery plays a mad genius submarine commander called “Crazy Ivan”. He stops American subs from sneaking up behind him by turning at random times in random directions. Follow too closely and you may get hit. I’m telling this story because people keeping asking me what I think Oracle will do with Sun. I think there’s no way to know.

If IBM had purchased Sun, things would have been easier to predict. I imagine the conversation in IBM’s boardroom going something like this: “They have a RISC chip; we have a RISC chip. Let’s phase theirs out. They have a UNIX; we have a UNIX. Let’s phase theirs out. They have Java, we have – uh – let’s keep that one!” And so on.

With Oracle, the outcome is not at all clear. Oracle is so different from Sun that they could keep pretty much everything. What parts of Sun are important depend on what kind of company Oracle is trying to become. Do they want to become a full-line systems vendor competing head-to-head with IBM and HP? Do they just want Java and MySQL, which are so closely related to their current product lines and strategies? Perhaps something more secret and clever than anyone else has thought of yet?

There’s just no telling, because Oracle is – and I mean this in the most positive and respectful way – the Crazy Ivan of the IT industry.

Authors@Google Talk for How To Castrate a Bull

I did one of those “Authors at Google” talks for my book. Here’s the talk link.

The audience was mostly engineers with a handful of managers. If that’s you, know that I prepared my presentation with you in mind.

AND – Why Customers Work With NetApp

I've asked many customers why they chose to work with NetApp. We've also done some formal market research on the subject. The answers mostly fall into three categories.

In some cases, customers are happy with what their IT infrastructure accomplishes for them, but they want to improve efficiency and drive out costs. NetApp has a variety of technologies to help customers store more data on fewer spindles, and we also use automation to allow more efficient storage management.

In other cases, customers want a more flexible IT infrastructure that lets them respond quickly to changing business requirements.  Here the focus is on capabilities like fast and easy provisioning to get new application environments installed quickly, or cloning to get new test and dev environments running quickly. Automation helps here as well, by providing application administrators self-service access to storage system capabilities.

Finally, customers sometimes want an experienced partner to help guide them. This is especially important for customers exploring newer, more innovative architectures based on server virtualization or cloud computing. One customer told me: “We expect you to help us predict the future.”

The thing is, few customers are satisfied with just one of these. Business flexibility may be the initial impetus to consider a new architecture, but they also want to run their IT infrastructure more efficiently. And they also want experienced partners who can help them set their course. Customers may prioritize one area over the others, but they'd rather not compromise on any of them.

This is the inspiration behind our new ad campaign. For most customers, it's not about just one thing; it's about getting them all at once: AND.