NetApp - Exposed

NewsFLASH: Spring SNW Orlando Preview

If you’re an “IT storage person”, next week is gonna be a fun storage geekfest at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando.  Whether you’re into Dedupe, FCoE, Multi-Vendor Storage Array Interoperability, Flash or Storage Standards in general, NetApp will be omnipresent at this year’s Spring Storage Networking World show organized by SNIA & ComputerWorld.

Cloud & Virtualization will be two of the dominant themes at the show, but the theme I’m most excited about is of course Solid State Storage.

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.

The Ironic Tension of Whistleblowing

Some of the greatest injustices are often propagated by the most powerful forces - even in plain sight of many witnesses who stay on the sidelines. The bravery of Whistleblowing is within everyone's reach when you're only exposing yourself to the backlash. However when the risk and sacrifice extends to others around you (including loved ones) going public is not always the right answer.

Forrester Research once again confirms what industry watchers like us already suspect. They report that the severe economic downturn upon us will significantly increase litigation this year. As Beth's StorageSoup blog points out today, IT departments are struggling to address last year's pace of archiving and discovery requests, leaving them in no position to handle the anticipated increases for 2009. In light of that, the last thing strained IT departments need to worry about is wasting precious time and resources on redundant data audits verifying assumptions about the fundamental integrity of their digital archives. The same archives that are supposed to protect the integrity of the parent organization itself.

If you've followed the "Exposed" blog this week, you won't be surprised by the copious feedback to my post about EMC Centera's weak reputation for data integrity. It turns out many subject-matter experts did indeed have lots of revealing professional insight into the situation. Yet unfortunately due to the collateral damage to their parent companies, all were reluctant to publish their thoughts publicly on this blog.

Except one.

EMC Centera Customers - Consider Your Whistle Blown

LOST is one of my favorite TV shows, but it is a work of fiction. Reality can be much harsher.

If you left your coat with the coat check service at a restaurant or theater, you would naturally expect to get it back upon producing the claim ticket. How upset would you be if the restaurant or theater lost your coat in this scenario? What are your legal options or reimbursement expectations in that case?

Now what if this same scenario involves your car left with a valet parking attendant? The stakes just got much higher. But it doesn't stop there. These metaphors can sadly escalate into nightmarish proportions when dealing with corporate data worth billions of dollars - or in the most extreme cases - patient data which of course is priceless.

Transition - Past is Prologue

Continuing with my Obama theme for a bit, the beginning of 2009 offers us more political and economic limbo.  Yet for the IT infrastructure industry and storage in particular, there are numerous lessons that emerged at the end of 2008 which we can apply as we sit down with our peers to figure out 2009.

Three sources in particular are worth paying attention to as we look for a common theme to emerge.

The Power of Pervasive, End-to-End Deduplication

People are starting to get it.  As usual, advanced customers are ahead of the pundits but one major milestone at a time, NetApp's dedupe innovation leadership continues to set the bar for the industry.

Remind me again who the storage deduplication leader is?

One-trick ponies like Data Domain have the luxury of pounding home marketing messages with a single-minded purpose using silly headlines, but the hard data released by NetApp this week exposes the underling truth.  On their latest earnings call, DDUP disclosed they have about 2100 customers, which I will generously extrapolate equals roughly 5000-6000 systems deployed in the field (they tend to be sold in pairs using IP replication).

Meanwhile we announced today over 2500 customers and 10,000 systems using NetApp Deduplication!  As an aside, we probably have triple that number using Thin Provisioning while 3PAR claims only hundreds of customers, yet who do the misinformed pundits associate as the leader in that regard?  Some days, I truly feel like Rodney Dangerfield - but not today! :)

If Billy Connolly were a storage guy

The blogosphere just got richer today, and our competitors have one less place to hide their flawed logic.  NetApp has unleashed our very own Big Yin, Alex McDonald with his new blog:

http://blogs.netapp.com/shadeofblue/

The profoundness of his observations is matched only by the sharpness of his wit.  I'd love to embed some clever Billy Connolly YouTube clip here to drive the point home visually, but I couldn't find any that were SFW, so you'll just have to amuse yourself :)

Welcome Alex!

Aiming low - Clouds at our feet

Pun Alert - Pun Alert!  I apologize in advance for the gratuitous weather-related puns in this and other blog posts regarding Cloud (or next-gen clustered aka scale-out) Storage, but we can't help ourselves.  Pithy blog titles are practically mandatory, aren't they?

Storage vendors both large and small are clamoring to announce their next-generation offerings.  The pace of announcements has been accelerating in 2008.  Without trying to ignore anyone in particular, my alphabetical list of next-gen storage competitors to NetApp includes but is not limited to:

• ExaNet (making waves with Fujitsu-Siemens lately)
• Ibrix (which I predict will be assimilated by the EMC Borg as early as next week)
• Isilon (neat technology, but still learning how to run a business)
• OnStor (still around, seemingly partnering with Fujitsu-not-Siemens now that 3Par prefers NetApp as their NAS Gateway)
• Panasas (diligently working to break out of their niche any decade now)
• PolyServe (HP's clustered NAS science project)
• XIV (IBM's play, notable for possessing the lone block-based architecture of this group)

So why am I disappointed?

Zen and the Art of Enterprise Storage

Almost a decade and counting now, my time at NetApp has been a career oxymoron.  You see, I've never been at a job (or contract) longer than 3 years before I joined NetApp (known as Network Appliance then) back in 1998.  Those who know me well often ask me why I'm still here, because they're keenly aware of my tendency to get bored easily and look towards the next challenge after the inevitable multi-year itch comes around.

I plan to expose many things in this blog, so in the spirit of fairness let me first expose myself a bit and explain the Zen of NetApp that not only keeps me here, but has me looking forward to my next decade @ NetApp.  To do that, I had to look waaaay back to my formative years when I read Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Robert's book title and text is widely quoted on the Internet, but it's his exploration of the spirituality of quality regarding how things are made and how they're used that always stuck with me.  Interestingly, that Zen seems to resonate increasingly over time during my career at NetApp.  So let's break that down a bit.

INNOVATION

Innovation is probably at the heart of it all.  This covers the "how things are made" part of the Zen in question.  My inner geek is still drawn to cool technology.  Our core DNA (summarized here by Bruce) is what attracted me to NetApp a decade ago, and our engineers continue to re-capture my imagination every few months with each new product release cycle.  I will no doubt post countless blogs on this topic alone, so I won't belabor the point here, but click on the graphic above & to the right for a short flash overview of but one great example of NetApp technology innovation widely used today.

APPLICATION

Layered on top of innovation is the "how it's used" part of the Zen.  The application of our innovation knows few limits today, being used across all industry verticals spanning the globe.  We help Main Street make and sell things, and we help Wall Street trade.  We help move people by land, sea and air.  We help provide energy, offer cost-effective services and after a good day's work we also help people play, but I personally believe there is no more noble application of technology than helping people heal.

SATISFACTION

One of my proudest moments at NetApp was seeing my initial storage customer in 1998 be awarded the inaugural NetApp Award for Individual Innovation several years later .  In and of itself that would have been cool.  But what took it to a higher plane was that Mark's organization was the first to decode the SARS virus applying NetApp innovation!

Seemingly many others enjoy a high sense of satisfaction with NetApp.  We are not only one of the highest ranking storage suppliers to be selected by Fortune Magazine in their Best Places to Work surveys, but we are actually the only tech company other than Google to crack the top 10!  Fortune also lists NetApp as one of the most admired tech companies.  Cross reference those two Fortune Mag lists and we humbly find ourselves in some pretty heady company!

Pulling it all together for me, "Zen and the Art of Enterprise Storage" is really about a heightened sense of personal satisfaction from the broad application of NetApp's unique innovation.

P.S. Ironically my day job running our competitive team is conversely related to this Zen, where my team and I work hard to make sure our competitors sing the blues, specifically the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.  I'll have much more on that later, so stay tuned!