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.
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.
If you’re involved in the storage industry, you may be wondering which is more newsworthy of late. Miss California, Bruno, or the NetApp-EMC tussle over Data Domain?
Regarding the latter, one of the most abused aspects of the discussion concerns NetApp’s track record regarding corporate acquisitions. Biased rhetoric about selective transactions hardly paints a clear or accurate picture. For proper perspective, it’s important to understand how NetApp’s growth plans drive our resulting acquisition strategy.
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.
Continue reading "Overtake this! Symmetrix V-Max? Frames are so 90’s" »
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.
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.
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.
"It's easy - All we have to do is sell products we haven't developed yet, to customers we haven't met yet, with people we haven't hired yet" -- Tom Mendoza in 1994 upon receiving a billion-dollar quota after booking $40M the year before.
I've known Dave Hitz for almost 11 years now, and I still marvel at his story-telling abilities. It's not just that he can repeat a story well, or that he can craft a compelling original one with the same ease. Dave has this rare talent for distilling complex scenarios of all kinds (technology, business, life, etc...) into simple analogies which even my immigrant grandparents could understand. The final subtle yet critical distinction is that he does it without insulting their intelligence. Add a disarming wry sense of humor and you've got the formula for what makes Dave truly exceptional.
Venture Capitalists are highly paid professionals who focus full-time on identifying the next "great idea" and then molding it into an enterprise which will hopefully reward their efforts handsomely. They've each developed their own proprietary formulas for success which understandably remain closely guarded secrets in their community.
This is the book for the rest of us.
In it, Dave applies his highly approachable story-telling skills at exposing critical lessons learned along the way towards building the very special company that NetApp has become. Executives and business leaders will naturally absorb many key elements from this book, but the real magic of it lies in the long-term observations that every employee of a young, ambitious, successful company can take away.
