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.
Continue reading "The future of Cloud Storage – See it (and me!) at SNW USA" »
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.
It’s how you finish of course! NetApp is expected to announce our Q4 earnings after the NASDAQ market closes tomorrow May 20th, closing out our fiscal year 2009.
With the worst of the recession occurring smack dab in the middle of our FY09, this has been both a challenging and educational year for us. As a result, during FY10 the NetApp Office of the CTO predicts customer purchasing trends will begin to shift en masse from products to Cloud Services, where Storage Efficiency will determine Cloud Storage Providers’ ultimate success or failure!
Among other accomplishments, NetApp executives will update the financial analysts on our dedupe market leadership and what we expect during the next 11 months throughout our FY10.
This promises to be a very special call, so I highly recommend all those interested in NetApp for whatever purpose - listen in!
NetApp recently co-sponsored with Cisco a bunch of premiers for the most successful Star Trek movie ever. As you might expect from my previous blogs on this topic, NetApp technology was once again pivotal in bringing this movie to market. ILM is not a tired storage marketing cliché to NetApp – it’s actually a premier customer! :)
There’s an interesting link emerging between the computing and storage infrastructures of leading post-production / animation houses - and Cloud Providers.
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" »
Quite a bit actually. In fact that award was for a bakeoff among a dozen iSCSI storage arrays back in the summer of 2008. Since then NetApp has won many more mainstream awards while receiving continued analyst and customer recognition. NetworkWorld recapped their Best of 2008 today, which included the FAS2050. While there have been numerous hardware (disk, HBA, NIC) and software (Data ONTAP) updates since then, there was also one loose end exposed which we are about to close.
UPDATE March 6th: To quote Mark Twain, the Rumors of FilerView's demise are greatly exaggerated!
I am in complete awe of EMC’s marketing prowess when it comes to pre-announcements like this week’s Flash SSD support for their stagnant Symmetrix DMX-4 product line. There is no doubt the clever strategic leaking of the press release to the Wall Street Journal (which does not have the technical prowess to properly see thru the marketing hype) followed by analyst and media briefings helped fuel the fire of positive exposure. Extensive blogging wisely helped further fan the flames. Kudos to EMC for orchestrating such an event.
But why am I still shocked?
Because the so-called industry pundits were actually acting more like industry parrots. The way I see it:
EMC got away with spinning high performance despite their failure to disclose even a single benchmark result or reference customer confirming the benefit in their environment.Mojo, Mario and Gary got it right. Respectively, they pointed out this is merely a marketing exercise which needs to be validated via proper Bench-Sizing and demonstrated to have better resulting manageability than superior approaches such as more scalable caching.
EMC won this battle, but who will win the war?
By pre-announcing a forthcoming flash storage option ahead of their rivals, EMC has created much-needed halo effect for the aging DMX platform. EMC has also exposed the potential of flash technology to the enterprise storage market.
However “Shock & Awe” doesn’t win wars. I predict storage vendors who can successfully deliver the benefits of flash technology to the broadest possible set of customers with a consistent management framework will be the ultimate winners.
True students of WAFL and Flash should be positively giddy at the potential for the two technologies to come together in an almost perfectly complementary way. I’m very excited about our roadmap in this regard, but I’ll have to wait for another day before I can share anything formal with you on this blog.
