I've been recently reading Dave Hitz's autobiography which covers a lot of the history of NetApp, how it came to be etc. It's an excellent read; not especially technical and gives you an insight into how a start-up came to be one of the largest storage companies in the world.
One of the things which was interesting though is how far NetApp have come from the starting vision; a company which was going to make cheap, small, network-attached storage appliances based on commodity hardware. How far are things like the 6080 and the 3170 away from this vision; in fact, NetApp seem to be surrendering the low-end of the market and have very few product offerings in this space.
Fortunately, there are some interesting smaller vendors who are building things on commodity hardware; this caught my eye recently, the QNAP TS-809 Pro, fully stacked it works out at about £250 per terabyte for a 12 terabyte system. It supports iSCSI, the normal NAS protocols and you can run a whole raft of other stuff as well.
I'm not suggesting that vendors like QNAP are going to be challenging NetApp et all any time soon but perhaps if you replaced the Operating System with OpenSolaris with ZFS or wait for BTRFS under Linux, the vision of Storage Appliances built cheaply out of commodity hardware and not charging crazy overheads may come true. Pity NetApp currently appear to have lost that vision, it was a worthy one. EMC were always about building storage arrays for the big boys; NetApp was supposed to be building storage for the rest of us.
Martin, you inspired me to post!
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2009/02/this-is-what-disruption-might-look-like.html
— Chuck
I don’t know if it was ironic or intentional, but when the company changed its name from Network Appliance to Netapp, it struck me that they had decided that identifying with their original “Appliance” business no longer mattered to them. An app and an appliance being quite different things.
It’s very difficult for an enterprise storage company to compete in the small business market. The business models are quite a bit different, which has a direct impact on how the company is structured. Very few business models allow a small product to grow into an enterprise product without a lot of pain for either the customer or the vendor. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t well understood back when Network Appliance was formed and the enterprise market for open systems storage has evolved far beyond where it was in the early nineties.
Of course, Netapp HAS had opportunities to do something but their attempts haven’t succeeded, I suspect it was because they didn’t believe in segmenting their business or having wholly owned subsidiaries that were treated independently. The “leverage everything” approach to technology doesn’t allow as much market expansion (or product breadth) as the “divide and conquer” approach.
Chuck, I ignored what EMC are doing with the iomega brand but it is interesting that EMC are looking at covering all the bases. A common hypervisor abstracting the NAS Operating System away from the hardware might allow EMC to have Dart running across the whole range. At that point, you’d have to do some serious work making Dart completely idiot-proof but the advantages would be immense.
Marc, I was wondering myself if the name change was both a reflection of what the brand had come to be anyway and also a move away from the appliance. Still, for the app to be pertinent, they’d need to ship some applications. Something which historically, they are not very good at.
Martin — the general theme of “putting stuff in hypervisors” is a powerful one — stay tuned!
— Chuck
As I wrote on TSA’s blog, EMC and Netapp stay surprisingly quiet about Sun’s Storage 7000 Systems.
I’m certain that the usual FUD will soon start.
It’s interesting that Sun does the same thing to Netapp, like Netapp did to Sun several years ago.
Use commodity components and sell cheaper. Only that Sun offers the building blocks for free (=>OpenSolaris), and the enterprise offering packaged as an appliance for a reasonable price.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, remembering that Sun is technologically ahead of EMC and Netapp, providing EFD’s as Cache _and_ disk replacements. Not to forget the brilliant DTrace based Analytics…
(Especially EMC likes to sell you services to do a performance analysis, just to sell you more hardware afterwards. I prefer to do performance analysis myself, and then fix the problems, not the symptoms…)
I really like the Sun 7000 range; it’s interesting but it currently doesn’t do FC, that causes me issues in my current environment. It also does not scale as much as I would like but it is an excellent software product, it is a product worth watching and I’ve not said that about a Sun storage product for a long time.
And for small, point solutions; it’d be on my list before some of the big boys. It’s amazingly close to what I believe what NetApp’s original vision was.
When predicting the future, sometimes what a vendor DOESN’T say can be more important than what it does 🙂
Very true Val…but at the moment, NetApp are extremely sparse of product at the low-end. A busy year ahead? OnTap 8? New high-end? New low-end?