MAD Blog: Onaro is not as much rubbish!

I couldn't help but laugh when I read Martin's blog about ECC.

When I first started working in the storage management space, i tried to understand who the competition was and understand why they were successful.

It was only after I experienced ECC in all of its pointless glory, did I truly appreciate how much opportunity for innovation there was in this space. And it was precisely because of that opportunity that I worked in storage management for about 5 years. One of the things we tried to do at NetApp was to try and build products our customers wanted to use. Products that solved real problems. And I wish I could say we had the perfect product, but that would be foolish. I can say that there were a lot of customers who really liked what they got. I hope some of them didn't think it was rubbish...

But I was delighted to read in a later post that Onaro may be useful. That was indeed high praise from someone so obviously and justifiably frustrated with the state of the art in vendor SRM tools.

When I first met the Onaro guys i was genuinely impressed with what they had. This was a very smart team, with a very cool product underpinned by some very interesting technology that solved a problem that, frankly, EMC and ECC should have solved a years ago.

To this day, Chuck's comments about NetApp's Onaro acquisition remind me of this parable.