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How Doomed is NetApp?

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Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#31

Post by madsushi »

KaiserPro wrote: post #17

There is one thing that Netapp does very well, which nobody else can really deliver: A file server that can serve over NFS & CIFS, whilst simultaneously be able to serve block traffic over FC, SAS and 10/40gig ethernet. With snapshots, decent performance, and once setup, can be left for 3 years (at which point its either too small or needs a new maintenance contract.) Nimble, they can do small, cheap and easy to conf…

(disclaimer, former NetApp and Nimble VAR)

NetApp is beat regularly for being too slow to new markets. Compellent was beating them in deals every day with Automated Storage Tiering (AST) and NetApp didn't respond (Compellent was acquired by Dell). If SSDs hadn't come along, Compellent would still be eating their lunch.

Then Nimble started beating them in deals every day with cheap SSD. NetApp only offered big monolithic PCI-E flash cards with a huge markup / licensing cost, while Nimble let you leverage "cheap" SSDs in a direct and scalable way. Nimble would give you a SAN with SSDs for $20k, where NetApp couldn't include their PAM flash card in any array under $40-50k. $20k of disk and SSD beats $20k of just disk most places. The new tech (SSDs) took NetApp several years to leverage. Even though NetApp's tooling, software, and capabilities were light years ahead, people could "make do" with Nimble and cheap SSDs. NetApp has only recently added reasonably priced SSDs to the mix.

NetApp regularly billed itself to partners as a "software company" who differentiated itself with software. They still have some of the most robust software in the business for encryption, replication, compliance, and orchestration. Their suite blows Nimble out of the water. But more and more, people are OK with running cheap, dumb, fast SANs and leveraging software on the other side (Windows, OpenStack, VMware) to handle storage intelligence.

As a hardware company, they're too slow and charging huge margins for consumer-available parts won't work forever. As a software company, their rivals in the non-storage world are quickly preparing to make them obsolete with server-side storage intelligence. Tough place to be, outside of enterprises who need your software stack (custom replication / cloning, retention, etc).

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#32

Post by lsc »

rodgerd wrote: post #3

"File Server Obsolescence" seems wildly unlikely. "Commodity software defined storage" (IBM selling XIV on generic hardware, Ceph, and so on) seems far more likely.

>"Commodity software defined storage" (IBM selling XIV on generic hardware, Ceph, and so on) seems far more likely.

Ceph and the other distributed things are pretty great if what you need is block devices. RADIOS, by all accounts, is pretty good. CephFS, on the other hand... not so much. It's hard to make a distributed coherent shared filesystem.

If you need a filesystem that can be mounted by multiple clients, NFS is still dang hard to beat.

NFS 4.1 with pNFS looks like it might take away a lot of the advantages a dual-head NetApp server has over a single zfs server.

But NFS itself? NFS has never been a real force in "production" - and that will continue.

Here in corp-land, though? and in some lab uses? where we really need a shared filesystem? NFS is not going anywhere.

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#33

Post by cenal »

KaiserPro wrote: post #17

There is one thing that Netapp does very well, which nobody else can really deliver: A file server that can serve over NFS & CIFS, whilst simultaneously be able to serve block traffic over FC, SAS and 10/40gig ethernet. With snapshots, decent performance, and once setup, can be left for 3 years (at which point its either too small or needs a new maintenance contract.) Nimble, they can do small, cheap and easy to conf…

Nexenta can do all this on on commodity hardware. Also checkout what http://www.ixsystems.com is up to if you want to see what they have done with FreeNAS.

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#34

Post by richmlpdx »

KaiserPro wrote: post #19
omerh wrote: post #5

All I can say is that I am moving everything I can to cloud object storage from my Netapp because of 2 cents vs. $2 for GB of storage. Also Netapp wouldn't be my third chios on the next purchase of storage

So what do you do when you need fast local storage?

We're looking at on-prem object storage (Cloudian on commodity hardware) and public offerings (Azure, S3) and NAS gateways. Avere, Panzura, CTERA, TwinStrata. There are several options depending on your use case. With dedup and compression, we can get on-prem pricing that is very close to cloud providers with the benefit of controlling the network end-to-end for.

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#35

Post by liveoneggs »

Twirrim wrote: post #22
KaiserPro wrote: post #17

There is one thing that Netapp does very well, which nobody else can really deliver: A file server that can serve over NFS & CIFS, whilst simultaneously be able to serve block traffic over FC, SAS and 10/40gig ethernet. With snapshots, decent performance, and once setup, can be left for 3 years (at which point its either too small or needs a new maintenance contract.) Nimble, they can do small, cheap and easy to conf…

I spoke with both IBM and NetApp vendors several years ago, just seeking an appliance. We didn't want phenomenal capacity, but needed something with good performance. I've never dealt with such completely incompetent salesmen before. Other vendors I've engaged have had salesmen relentlessly pursue me for the sale, even when it was very likely a small contract to them. Both NetApp and IBM left me having to do the chas…

Yes. NetApp products tend to be really great but dealing with their sales guys directly sucks.

Next time contact an VAR like Vandis who will size it, sell it, and help (or just do) set it up.

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#36

Post by liveoneggs »

SniperOwl wrote: post #4

Nimble, Pure and Nutanix are delivering easy to use, high performance storage/compute for a fraction of the cost of EMC and Netapp. This is reason why Netapp is losing clients to Nimble, and EMC is losing to Pure. Cisco should stay on their toes with Nutanix line of Software defined hardware.

I'll bet many of those nimble customers go back to netapp.

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#37

Post by hyuen »

drieddust wrote: post #25

I am currently struggling with NetApp support. After 2 weeks of constant effort they finally admitted of disk latency. More digging revealed that they sold an under performing system at a inflated cost to run MS exchange 2010. NetApp do not add any value since Exchange do not need or actually utilise any of the features. NetApp's WAFL( write anywhere) and insistence on using 4k block for disk io is the biggest design…

I think you should take a look at nimble, especially at the slide for exchange efficiency, it is on a microsoft page btw. Disclaimer I wrote the plugin to backup exchange at nimble.

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#38

Post by tw04 »

SniperOwl wrote: post #4

Nimble, Pure and Nutanix are delivering easy to use, high performance storage/compute for a fraction of the cost of EMC and Netapp. This is reason why Netapp is losing clients to Nimble, and EMC is losing to Pure. Cisco should stay on their toes with Nutanix line of Software defined hardware.

Then you need a new sales rep. Nimble markets themselves as being a cheaper alternative but they absolutely are not. I've priced both and the 2500 is consistently cheaper per TB. Pure isn't even close and doesn't claim to be unless you're comparing $/IOP instead of $/GB, and even then if you find the right NetApp rep they'll at least make you decide on product features instead of price.

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#39

Post by aw3c2 »

biturd wrote: post #26

What I don't understand is on their flagship product, an all SSD drive array, they claim 500,000 IOPS (sustained I/O rate), yet i have heard of many people doing more than 1 million IP's/s in http and in database. If others can do a million how are they if something that is seemingly as fast as can be with an all SSD system can only do half that at a pure I/O level no less.

RAM caching.

Re: How Doomed is NetApp?

#40

Post by nasalgoat »

Twirrim wrote: post #22
KaiserPro wrote: post #17

There is one thing that Netapp does very well, which nobody else can really deliver: A file server that can serve over NFS & CIFS, whilst simultaneously be able to serve block traffic over FC, SAS and 10/40gig ethernet. With snapshots, decent performance, and once setup, can be left for 3 years (at which point its either too small or needs a new maintenance contract.) Nimble, they can do small, cheap and easy to conf…

I spoke with both IBM and NetApp vendors several years ago, just seeking an appliance. We didn't want phenomenal capacity, but needed something with good performance. I've never dealt with such completely incompetent salesmen before. Other vendors I've engaged have had salesmen relentlessly pursue me for the sale, even when it was very likely a small contract to them. Both NetApp and IBM left me having to do the chas…

I was spending almost $2 million on a 1PB solution and I couldn't get NetApp to call me back.

EMC knew the name of my senior admin when they called me back in 2 hours.

Guess who got my money?

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