Extensible NetApp: Thinking outside of the box

MAD blog: Chuck demands customers stop buying frankenstorage

I never thought I would see the day where Chuck Hollis would admit that Frankenstorage was a term (a term I believe coined by NetApp to describe the NX4 and EMC VTL).

I never though that I would see Chuck tell customers to not buy Frankenstorage. Good for you Chuck, I thought. Finally calling a shovel a shovel instead of a Lexus.

I thought can it be? Can EMC's VP of Marketing (or Spin?) finally be telling customers something truthful about unified storage? Like how using four different technologies for provisioning and data protection does not unified storage make?

Nope.

It's the damnable v-series. The damnable v-series. That's the piece of technology he hates. A piece of technology he went out of his way to distort facts about. And it's not because of our support of the TMS device, but because you stick a v-series in front of a Symm or a CLARiON and you suddenly need less disk. And that saves money. Not funny money but real dollars and anything he can say or due to blunt that point he will say and do. And if all you're using the Symm for is disk drives, you need less of their software. And that has got to hurt.

Of course the v-series and RAMSAN combo is not a unified storage device. But EMC has yet to ship any device that meets a reasonable definition of such a device. And for Chuck to lecture about any term, after all he coined Real FiberChannel(tm), is darn funny. So unlike the the original Frankenstorage, other than hardware management, all of your day-to-day operations are done consistently in a uniform way. You know using the ONTAP tools. But you've read that rant of mine before.

So I suddenly realized what the issue was: Professional Jealousy. Dr. Frankenstein is pissed off that someone else knows how to put together a device made up of multiple hardware devices and add value to customers.

And not only can we do that, but we can make our systems simpler to manage and adminsister than what the good doctor produced.

Hmm...

VTL Deduplication, NetApp Style

I believe that architectural style is a natural outgrowth of your organizational DNA.

If you spend all of your time thinking about how to modify a software system, then you tend to modify the software system.

If you spend all of your time building different hardware platforms, then you tend to build lots of hardware systems.

And this fundamental philosophical approach to system design is reflected in how you think about systems. For example, for a NetApp engineer the notion that a unified storage platform is a combination of a set of distinct hardware pieces running different software is an odd statement. For EMC, apparently, the combination of different hardware systems into an aggregate hardware system is unified storage. And I guess from their point of view, namely that there is a single aggregate hardware device that can do everything, they are right.

And I've explained why the two approaches offer fundamentally different value propositions.

Why bring this up, again?

Because the NetApp VTL team announced the availability of deduplication on our VTL systems.

And because, the NetApp VTL team has our engineering DNA in them rather than apply bolted-on technology, like EMC, they integrated deduplication into the core system design.

The net effect is that the VTL team can deliver a simpler system, a more reliable system and I believe, ultimately, a faster system. The system is simpler because it has fewer moving parts. More reliable because it does not have multiple hardware components that can fail. And a faster system because integrating deduplication with the code that manages the disk ultimately can give you faster performance because you don't have multiple layers of software mucking with the disk layout.

I believe those attributes of simplicity and reliability and speed have real value to customers. 

So I am very excited with this most recent announcement, not only because we address a key customer demand, but also because of the way we did it.