NetApp - Exposed

Flash in the Pan^H^H^H Cloud

Two of my favorite technical topics of discussion are solid-state storage and the Cloud Computing trend.  Talking about each has become more than work for me, it’s become a hobby.  Talking about both in context is even cooler!

Tomorrow morning, I have the opportunity to discuss the intersection of these two topics on a morning panel at IDEMA DISKCON 2009.  How Cloud Storage is Changing the Building Blocks of Traditional Enterprise Storage will be hosted by:

• John Rydning, Research Director, Hard Disk Drives, IDC and
• Rick Villars, Vice President for Storage Systems & Executive Strategies, IDC

Experts from 3PAR, LSI & Pliant will join me on tomorrow morning’s panel (Session 4 @ 9:00am on Thursday Sept 24th).  I look forward to the discussion and will post feedback and my PPT once it’s done.

If you’re at the conference or near Santa Clara and are interested, I hope to see you there!

Overtake this! Symmetrix V-Max? Frames are so 90’s

Wither the DMX moniker? With all his legal troubles, I guess the name association was getting a bit troublesome :)

Without too much digging tonight, I stumbled upon an over-view of EMC’s over-hyped “Over-take the Future” product announcement set for tomorrow. Seems like FT didn’t quite plug all their leaks of the EMC press embargo.

3Par’s Deep Throat and Rickroller extraordinaire Marc Farley has a point that EMC seems to be plagiarizing the InServ spec sheet from a product perspective. Seems like Compellent will soon be releasing a press release quoting their CEO with the same opinion. But that box-oriented viewpoint is far too narrow.

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.

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 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! :)

Two major influences on Enterprise Storage

Music and complexity.

Apple's iPod

The connection is not immediately obvious to some, but this nice overview of the current state of Flash Storage reveals the risks and opportunities that this promising technology revolution is confronting our industry with. Were it not for the overwhelming popularity (especially unit volume of Apple's flash-based) iPod models, the momentum of price reductions driving this trend would not be possible.

Flash changes *everything*

The more I study the impact of flash, the more I'm convinced of two conclusions:

1. The storage industry impact of this technology reaches *far* beyond most people's imaginations, and
2. NetApp's Hardware and Software Intellectual Property is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this trend in a manner far greater than current NetApp competitors.

I plan to spend a lot of time blogging on the huge NetApp potential for this technology, so stay tuned and feel free to share comments on related topics and ramifications you'd like me to address.

Faster, greener storage is not necessarily simpler

The powerfully simple concepts of "Data Sets" and "Policies" will save enterprise storage. The more our industry brings cool products to market, the more challenges we present our user base with regarding managing them all.

Read Kostadis' coverage of a pivotal NetApp solution to this problem.

As per above, you can expect more coverage on this topic here in the future.