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Wobbles?

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…

 


7 Comments

  1. Sto Rage says:

    We are a relatively big NetApp shop, and yes we are seeing the same trend in-house. Over the last few years we consolidated from 40 controllers to 10. Largely due to the big increase in drive capacities. The idea was to reduce data-center sprawl, less power & cooling. We did achieve that goal.
    But this resulted in over allocation because in order to get the same performance, we had to increase the spindle counts in many cases. Resulting in lower utilization.
    Now in order to increase utilization we are looking at 3rd-party NAS accelerators (AVERE, Gridiron, Alacritech etc). So the dollars that would have gone to NetApp may go to other vendors who can help us better utilize our NetApp capacity.

    1. Michael Farnk says:

      Have you looked at FlashCache to help performance? I have seen the same thing with being more limited by IOPS than by capacity. FlashCache is helping me get more performance out of the same number of spindles.

  2. Alex says:

    What I’ve seen is that consolidation combined with onto 8 (which enabled aggregates bigger that 16tb) means that utilization can finally rise, this means less disk purchases as old disks are recycled into bigger pools.

    Alex

  3. Sto Rage says:

    Yes, we did look/are looking at FlashCache. Rather than getting 10 individual FlashCahce cards, the idea is to get one appliance(or a pair) that can front-end all 10 of them. Also isn’t FlachCache mostly for read performance?
    There are challenges with this approach (3rd party appliance) though, .i.e. not very good support for CIFS, ISCSI etc. Also our snapshot scripts for databases and VMware won’t work as we no longer would be talking to the filers directly.

  4. Hello all, Dimitris from NetApp here.

    I like Chris Mellor but remember – he’s paid by the word and traffic driven to his site.

    According to IDC figures, if one looks at the Open Systems Networked Storage marketshare, NetApp remains #2 after EMC, even though EMC has a plethora of products.

    The NetApp share was 14.5% according to IDC, up from 13.3% a year ago.

    That’s not called “declining”.

    What the figures don’t show is that IDC doesn’t count the ton of NetApp product resold by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Dell, and more.

    Once that’s taken into account, the share grows to over 21%, or a very very big bump up indeed.

    “Lies, damn lies and statistics” indeed.

    EMC is still higher at 31.9%, but the gap is narrowing…

    Again – how exactly that is a sign of a company in a wobbly state is beyond me.

    Thoughts?

    Thx

    D

    1. Martin Glassborow says:

      After years of stellar growth, you are growing more slowly. If you look at the IDC figures for External disk sales for 4Q11, it shows that you grew less than 1%. Also fascinatingly, the IDC figures show a slight decline in NAS growth in general; which is also interesting.

      So NetApp’s growth is slowing and their core technology segment shrank a little bit.

      Anecdotal evidence (and I’m not IDC) suggest that large petabyte+ users are trying to consume what they have got where utilisation figures are not great. And there are good historical reasons for that and even some in NetApp will admit that you could have done with larger aggregates a lot sooner.

      I think you will come out of this slight growth wobble but it might actually do you some good to consider the reasons why growth slowed slightly. There are many reasons, some out of your control obviously..

  5. Oh, and I forgot to mention, again according to IDC figures, NetApp is #1 in the replication software marketshare, ahead of EMC. 32.7% vs 31.4%. Close, but if one considers the relative size of the 2 companies, and how many EMC products are counted in that percentage, the NetApp figure is even more impressive.

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