NetApp - Exposed

Enabling, rather than (V)blocking Cloud Adoption

(This will be the first of a series of posts outlining the differences between NetApp’s and EMC’s Cloud Strategies)

The worst-kept secret Acadia joint venture between Cisco, EMC and clearly reluctant VMware finally hit the wires today.  Based on the buzz generated by the VMworld rumor mill all the way back in August, today’s announcement probably needs to be added as another example of this.

Jay summarized our strategic view of why “doing best-of-breed right” is better than vendor lock-in by removing customer choice.  Apparently, he’s not alone.  Yet as I was absorbing the locust swarm of related Twitter commentary and media / blog coverage, an eerie sense of déjà-vu came over me.  Has EMC gone and done it again?

The future of Cloud Storage – See it (and me!) at SNW USA

Want some insider info?  A few weeks ago, storage insiders got to see and comment on SNIA’s proposed Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard.  Tomorrow morning at SNW USA in Phoenix, the storage public gets to witness the future of Cloud Storage firsthand.

NetApp’s Cloud Journey - Continued

In the beginning of our Journey, I covered Cloud origins and history, as well as NetApp’s definition of our Cloud Market opportunity.  Key lessons around not competing against your best customers and the requirement for a Cloud Ecosystem and implementation scope were also reviewed.

This blog will continue the discussion, building on the concepts from my prior blog in order to complete the introduction of NetApp’s Cloud Strategy.

NetApp’s Cloud Journey – The Beginning

As NetApp’s Cloud Czar, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of witnessing our company rally around and fully embrace the Cloud Computing market opportunity in response to the unprecedented transformation of IT we are witnessing as this decade comes to a close.

In our thorough assessment of this market, NetApp made a few key strategic decisions which we will be introducing throughout the remainder of this year.

Blweet – Google’s Cathartic Day

What’s a blweet?  Well it’s a short blog post that’s longer than a tweet of course!  According to a basic Google / Bing search, I may actually be coining the term, so you read it here first.

Winning Rounds 1, 2 & 3

By making the opening move and controlling the action, NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) won Round 1 of the battle to acquire Data Domain (NASDAQ:DDUP), even before the fight with EMC (NYSE:EMC) broke out!

With EMC finally surfacing from the shadows, Round 2 was all about Culture Wars, which is a slam dunk for NetApp.

Round 3 just ended, and despite EMC’s stoic posturing against the possibility of U.S. government antitrust review, it seems EMC is wrong again, now losing this latest round to NetApp. Again.

Although the pattern is now clear, if you want to see why this is trending in NetApp’s favor, I recommend some …

Culture Wars

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.

Blogruptcy

Blog Bankruptcy or "Blogruptcy" comes about with the convergence of 3 underlying factors.  "Comment Bankruptcy", "Logical Bankruptcy" and finally "Ethical Bankruptcy".  I don't do this lightly, but this past week I've witnessed events which lead me to declare one particular blog completely bankrupt.

Calculating Usable Capacity - Rocket or Nuclear Science?

Marketing claims recognized by independent experts

About a month ago, B&S editor Mary Jander published a blog covering the recent Green Enterprise IT awards, which featured NetApp and 7 other winning vendors.  NetApp was cited for improving primary (gross) usable capacity from 40% (already above the Unix/Windows industry average of 30%) to 60% for our internal production systems which feature all advanced data protection and replication features enabled.  Note that the judges reviewed NetApp's infrastructure for this award before we released our unique FAS deduplication functionality for primary as well as secondary data sets.  Our internal analysis shows deploying FAS deduplication increases NetApp usable capacity numbers even higher.

NetApp was also recognized by the Uptime Institute in that same study for reducing our total number of storage systems from 50 to 10, cutting our number of racks from 25.83 to 5.48, and decreasing direct power consumption by 41,184 kWh per month.

It's not easy being green

However over in the comments section of that B&S blog today, one user seemingly wasn't impressed by the resulting 60% usable capacity number, so I offered up a short explanation (comment #6).  As Paul Harvey likes to say, here's the rest of the story...

So, why "Exposed"?

According to Google, the word is associated with a show on MTV, an obscure movie from 1983, a defunct dot com website, and all manner of paparazzi-related celebrity fodder.  Dictionary.com lists over 25 definitions for the word, from mundane to titillating.  Clearly it can have different meanings depending on the context.

As someone who has been selling storage systems for over 10 years, I will use this blog to expose many of the more sensational, mundane, interesting and unexpected practices in our industry - enterprise storage.