NetApp - Exposed

And The Contest Evolves

Dr. Dedupe has taken the bull by the horns and helped raise the ante on the bonus prize.  He has posted the lyrics to our much-talked-about YouTube video and challenged the blogosphere / twitterverse / web2dotWhateverWorld to the following:

Send him your version of the lyrics, or better yet send him a video of your dedupe parody song and he'll send you some NetApp beanies just like the one worn by N-Tap.  He doesn't need anything fancy, just get those Blackberry's and Flip's rolling, post your video on YouTube and send the link to his blog.  And remember to keep it clean people! :)

Custom lyrics are one thing, but I'm sure the good doctor and I can offer up a very desirable bonus prize to anyone who posts a homegrown video (not someone else's) version of this NTAP dedupe rap.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Efficiency Unleashed

One of our most sought-after customer-facing advocates is also a Consulting Systems Engineer.  Last summer Mike Riley started a popular internal blog for NetApp employees and partners.  As a longtime fan, I've bugged him to spread his unparalleled wisdom and wit with a wider audience ever since.

Today I'm thrilled to announce I've worn him down and Mike has launched a public blog focused on the hottest possible customer topic around.  I proudly welcome you to NetApp's Storage Efficiency Insights Blog!

Mike is stacking the deck by making this a group blog where he has assembled an awesome collection of NetApp storage talent to add their insights and help customers / architects / consultants / integrators / etc... realize maximum infrastructure efficiency.

Oh and one last warning to our competitor's bloggers.  You will soon realize after reading this new blog that we've been holding back until now.  Mike and team will certainly try to be merciful when they spot spiteful FUD-filled content-free comments or blogs about NetApp, but their infectious wit is hard to contain.  At least now you've been warned :)

Can you spot me^H^Hus?

UPDATE FEB 26th:  Our VP & GM in Product Operations (Louis Selincourt) is also lurking somewhere in this clip.  Spot him and he's offered up a dinner date with the winner!

In a moment of weakness, our clever marketing folks convinced me to be an "extra" on the set shooting NetApp's first-ever rap video.  So to make this even more fun, I'll give away some cool NetApp swag to the first commenters on this blog who can spot either of:

1. My specific location(s) in this video, or
2. When I first appear (mm:ss), or
3. How long I appear for, or
4. When I last appear.

I'll also give a bonus prize (see above for the latest) to whoever will post a home-grown custom youtube video version of our dedupe rap.  And yes even my avid EMC and HP readers qualify :)

UPDATE FEB 25th:  For those who are not movie buffs, I should take a moment to explain that this is based on the climactic scene from Eminem's Movie 8 Mile of a few years ago ... and was done with tongue firmly planted in cheek of course :)

FAS2050 Wins Award – What Else Is New?

Quite a bit actually. In fact that award was for a bakeoff among a dozen iSCSI storage arrays back in the summer of 2008. Since then NetApp has won many more mainstream awards while receiving continued analyst and customer recognition. NetworkWorld recapped their Best of 2008 today, which included the FAS2050. While there have been numerous hardware (disk, HBA, NIC) and software (Data ONTAP) updates since then, there was also one loose end exposed which we are about to close.

UPDATE March 6th: To quote Mark Twain, the Rumors of FilerView's demise are greatly exaggerated!

It's Never The Underlying Scandal That Gets You In Trouble

... Rather, it's always the attempted cover-up.  I asked a clear question on my blog yesterday about why a mainstream IT article covering Centera went from white in the morning to black by the same afternoon?

EMC responded with a lot of huffing and puffing, even a technical diatribe.  But apart from not even addressing the technology behind a simple MD5 hack to intentionally make data disappear forever on earlier generations of Centera, they avoided the elephant in the room altogether.

Why did they try (and fail) to cover it all up?

Based on EMC's track record to date, expecting a straight answer on this critical question is about as likely as EMC being voted the best place to work for in the US by Fortune Magazine.

Amping up the exposure on this whole topic has been my aim from the beginning. I never expected the other side to help out quite this much, but I am satisfied my goal has been accomplished.  Barring any unforeseen events, I'm going to retire this topic on my end for now.

Bercovici ... OUT! :)

Will the Real Storage Deep Throat Please Stand Up?

What do Georgina Dickinson, Richard Johnson, Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein have in common?  They work(ed) for The News of the World, New York Post, and The Washington Post respectively.

The last two names should ring a very familiar bell to those who follow American Political Scandals, but I am also fascinated by the first two and their associations.

Solid State Storage – the Sinatra Way

NetApp has built our business on leading via innovation, instead of following conventional wisdom.  In our earliest days, we bypassed file-serving via a general-purpose OS in favor of an efficient stripped down micro-kernel which delivers far more performance and efficiency, while offering more stability without the extra code bloat.  We chose native kernel-mode protocol implementations for NFS and CIFS instead of user-mode protocol emulation.  That enabled maximum performance and even true multi-protocol locking on the same file if necessary.

Thinovation

Other even more profound innovations feature the industry’s only RAID without compromise (enabling maximum performance, availability and efficiency in the same configuration), giving life to low-cost ATA technology in enterprise settings.  We stood out with native Thin functionality (Provisioning / Cloning / Replication) implemented at the core of our I/O engine to elegantly complement our still-exclusive dedupe capabilities on ALL tiers of storage, featuring primary instead of merely backup and archive.

Deep application integration and scalable policy-based management helps you actually apply this storage innovation to your most common enterprise apps.  Modular and consistent controller architectures with in-place upgrades make these sometimes exotic features all the more approachable to every IT department.

Unified Storage 2.0

The advent of Solid State announcements among Enterprise Storage vendors over the past year offered NetApp once again an opportunity to bypass conventional wisdom.  So we chose to redefine the concept of Unified Storage which NetApp coined years ago with our first combined SAN/NAS/iSCSI array.

Welcome to NetApp Unified Storage 2.0 -  doing Solid State Storage – our way.