Handbags At Dawn….

Every now and then, it is good to see Storagezilla let fly as he does here and here. Yes, I know I normally rail against such behaviour but it’s always good to see Storagezilla frothing at the mouth in full rabid attack dog mode.

I find myself in the strange position in agreeing with both Zilla and Alex tho’…

Alex is right that the market has changed and some not-so-new requirements have bubbled up the agenda and are becoming more than a niche. And NetApp needed to do something to address these customer requirements.

Storagezilla is right that NetApp are basically finding themselves dangling from their own petard and could do with a dose of mea cupla.

The Cult of WAFL really meant that NetApp could not develop themselves out of the situation they had got themselves into; the only way to jump-start their presence into this ‘new’ market was to buy themselves into it.

Much as we’d all like this storage thing to be unified and simple (well, some of us would anyway); it’s not and I for one welcome NetApp to reality.

But it does give NetApp a small market positioning issue; you can’t well point at EMC and say that they obviously don’t believe in Unified Storage because they have different products to meet different requirements…EMC have acknowledged in a few places that they got it wrong with regards with Unified Storage perhaps, just perhaps, NetApp can say the same thing.

Of course, EMC never, ever told us that Celerra with MPFS was a better solution to scale-out-storage than Isilon. They certainly don’t now.

I also sometimes wonder why EMC never released Infiniflex as a stand-alone product; now that’d be a very interesting product in the Big Data world. Sometimes the value is lack of frills; not every product needs frills beyond excellent engineering.

But I’m not sure EMC would want to add another storage product to their portfolio….well, not this week.