It’s been a long week here in LA at our SE Insight conference, but a good one. Old friends, new contacts. As was the case last year, we had a large contingent of partners, and the second conference in Prague will have even more in attendance than here if I’ve read the numbers correctly.
Plus some really great sessions with plenty of information. Of note was this year’s keynote, which featured the two Toms. Tom Georgens, our President and COO, and Vice Chairman Tom Mendoza (who was, as usual, outrageously funny while making a serious point).
What was most interesting to me though was Tom Georgen’s talk, and its focus.
Tom mentioned the arguments that had erupted around the issue of various storage system capacity “overheads”, imagined or otherwise, in the blogosphere. Chuck Hollis of EMC fired the first salvo with some distinctly dodgy research, lots of people including me got stuck right in and pointed out where EMC’s calculations were flawed and based on outdated information, heat and light were generated in varying proportions and eventually a truce was declared. Of sorts.
But why would the COO of NetApp even see this blog spat as important, far less mention it?
Tom was making the point that in an economic downturn, everyone -- but everyone -- wants to minimize spend and maximize efficiency. It’s all about storage efficiency. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last six months, the reason it’s the right message at the right time should be self evident.
It’s not the first time he’s spoken about this. At this year’s Oracle World keynote in September his speech was Do More, Store Less: Efficiency Gains and Breakthroughs for Your Business, and on our latest earnings call it got several mentions.
Deduplication for primary storage (and VTL), thin provisioning with FlexClones, RAID-DP and more that allow us to make a 50% space saving guarantee with VMware. We can do that because cool NetApp technologies address the hot topics that customers care about. And this one, as Tom pointed out, is red hot.
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