Okay, so once more I take my life into my own hands and post about NetApp! I look forward to the hordes descending and telling me how terribly wrong I am and how I don’t understand anything!
So let’s get this straight, I think NetApp are a great company and they have done the storage world a great service in the way that they simplified administration and furthered the cause of IP storage, especially NAS. They led the way in taking commodity components and turning them into Enterprise class arrays; we should thank them for all of this!
But are NetApp having a bit of a blip in growth? Chris Mellor certainly seems to think so in his interpretation of the latest IDC Storage Tracker figures although there is a different take here; so it’s not entirely clear however I have some thoughts on all of this.
Having taken a straw-poll of some of my peers in the industry, large NetApp estates have such terrible utilisation figures that dedupe is pretty meaningless; 25-40% utilisation seems to be relatively common with reporting based around ‘effective capacity’ sometimes making it worse.
But I am beginning to see utilisation figures creep up; there is an increasing challenge to use this unused capacity and push it up. So existing NetApp customers might not be buying quite so much and are under increased pressure to use what they’ve already got. Has this impacted NetApp’s run-rate business?
And if customers can’t use the capacity that they’ve got; this is going to lead to some hard questions and there are now a plethora of vendors who have solid NAS products who can push NetApp very hard on capability and incredibly hard on price.
That and the confusion that OnTap 8 brought with it’s choice of modes has probably left NetApp a little wobbly.
Throw in the Engenio acquisition which confused their story even more and actually, it turns out that NetApp might not have purchased Engenio at the best possible time with them moving into an architectural refresh all of their own.
I think NetApp may continue to have a wobbly few quarters but that might not be such a bad thing. Great companies do wobble and learn from it; let’s hope that NetApp are a great company, I think they are…