NetApp - Exposed

Recap - NetApp Cloud Twitterview

When learning about new technology and related business models, dialogues are much more useful than monologues.  Social Media avenues offer useful tools for vendors to educate the market.  Twitter (and I suppose Facebook’s FriendFeed) have become excellent vehicles for engaging in a dialogue with your audience.  These tools are also more transparent than some corporate propaganda blogs which attempt to censor healthy debate after posting provocative FUD.

Twitter’s conversational nature is also more conducive to humorous sarcasm. My new favorite tag is @sfoskett’s #selftweetthursday :)

NetApp Cloud – The Twitterview

Join me and George Crump today @ 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET to see us discuss NetApp’s recent Cloud Launch for about 40 minutes.

I’ll be answering George's Tweet-questions for the first 20 minutes, followed by other public tweets in the final 20 minutes.  See my related blog below for who to follow if you want to view the Twitterview live in real-time.

Cheap Insurance

It turns out today (and the last Friday of every July) is SysAdminDay, so this post is rather timely, despite the festive nature of today.

 

It'll Never Happen to Me

NetApp customers reading my blog and related media coverage over the past week have asked "Do I *really* need to do this?" and much more interestingly "What else will be fixed if we upgrade to the latest recommended releases of Data ONTAP (7.0.7, 7.1.3 or 7.2.5.1)?"

Good questions I thought, so I checked with our security team and here's what I found out.

There were a number of other security-related fixes included in these latest releases of Data ONTAP which have nothing to do with SnapLock, but nevertheless close recently discovered vulnerabilities also exposed as part of our increased scope of testing.  As with most fixed security vulnerabilities, the severity of these range from minor to serious, but none are critical.

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?