So it seems that IBM have finally decided to stop reselling NetApp filers and focus on their own products; I’m also waiting for the inevitable announcement that they will stop selling the rebadged Engenio products as well as there is fairly large cross-over there.
In fact there is more cross-over between IBMs own Storwize range and the Engenio range than there is between IBM’s NAS and NetApp’s NAS. So I guess we’ll probably see V5000u and V3700U announcements in the future. And if IBM really want to be a little bit nasty, they’ll push the external virtualisation capabilities of the Storwize Unified Devices and their much larger current support matrix for external devices.
But have we reached ‘Peak NAS’? I’m beginning to feel that we might have; certainly in the traditional filer-space. Sure there is growth but people simply don’t want to store their oceans of data on expensive filer devices and pretty much all of the filer devices are expensive; they are certainly more expensive than some of the commodity plays but they also are fairly close to the cost of AFAs, especially when you start looking at the inevitable software options that you have to license to make them work well.
NetApp really grew on the back of VMware; it was always amusing that when the VMware sales-team used to turn-up, it would often be with a NetApp salesman in tow and never an EMC salesman; embarrassed by the relationship it seemed. It is only in the last couple of years that there has appeared to be a closer relationship between VMware and EMC..of course VSAN means that they don’t really want to turn up with any storage partner these days.
NetApp’s challenge is going to be how to make themselves relevant again and re-invent themselves; from what I know about FlashRay, this is probably the most promising AFA technology from a mainstream vendor but they need to ship.
And they need to work out how to survive in market that is going to be driven by price…no-one is going to pay $1000s per terabyte to store home-directories and unstructured data; compressed or deduped.
I guess the same challenge that every vendor is currently struggling with…it just feels that NetApp are struggling more than most.