FOX News / Bill O'Reilly fans will instantly recognize this topical metaphor for the sometimes polarized political landscape in America these days.
While it may seem odd to outside Information Technology observers, for those of us in the storage industry this is also amounting to a central theme in the Data Domain acquisition saga between NetApp and EMC.
Cultural History
NetApp started out as a NFS file server appliance company. Back in the mid 90’s for a bunch of Unix bigots, the Windows marketplace was initially viewed as a hostile and foreign landscape. One which was easy to dismiss and resist. Yet reason quickly trumped emotion as we embraced Windows engineers, partners and customers to become the industry’s first and most successful “Multi-Protocol” storage company, happily selling both NFS and CIFS NAS solutions side by side.
Years later, “Blockheads” invaded our fun little NAS party – helping us create the industry’s first and broadest family of Unified Storage (SAN, iSCSI & NAS) products. Ever since, no other company has grown SAN marketshare at a higher rate in the subsequent years.
A Culture of Efficiency
At NetApp, we’re focusing a lot of our efforts on articulating the tangible customer value of our overall storage efficiency story. Pervasive end-to-end deduplication with a focus on up-front savings in homogeneous primary & secondary online tiers, leveraging a range of differentiated yet highly integrated storage efficiency technologies (RAID-DP, Snapshots, Thin Provisioning, Cloning & Replication, Deduplication, etc…) is clearly resonating in this era of tight capital and operational budgets.
Complementary Efficiency
We’re looking forward to supplementing our existing storage efficiency offerings with Data Domain’s backup-optimized storage efficiency technology, based on their market-leading heterogeneous backup dedupe technology. A balanced portfolio of homogenous and heterogeneous storage efficiency solutions will help our customers finally see the horizon for controlling and protecting the endless sprawl of business-driven storage growth within their environments.
Forecasting Culture
Looking ahead, Cloud Storage represents another opportunity for us to embrace and adopt new cultures and philosophies into our broad portfolio, this time as storage services complementing storage products.
Expect more on our innovative Cloud Storage strategy in subsequent exposed blogs
NetApp is very adept at avoiding the Culture (Civil) Wars that can tear up other weaker organizations. Our decade-and-a-half long history of outpacing the growth of the overall storage market is firm proof that we can develop, sell, service and support both homogenous and heterogeneous products & solutions in a highly innovative and competitive market!
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