More storage capacity and faster performance in new storage systems is anything but new these days. If anything, in this day and age enterprise organizations want to feast on these features PLUS options that keep them lean by enabling them to more efficiently use these resources, requiring less time to manage them and quickly integrating them with their emerging virtual environments. It is these features and more that NetApp served up to enterprises earlier this week.
In case you missed it, NetApp announced the availability of six (6) new storage systems: three new high end FAS6200 Series models along with three new midrange FAS3200 Series models. So as you might expect with the release of any new storage system, each of these offers more cache, more capacity, more storage network connectivity options and more performance than its predecessors.
However the real story in storage these days is less about how much storage capacity a specific storage system contains or even how well it performs (though I am certainly not trying to diminish those features.) Rather enterprise organizations are hungry for storage systems that:
- Are easy to manage on an ongoing basis
- Integrate with virtualized server operating systems such as VMware
- Efficiently and effectively use the included storage features
It is in these three areas that NetApp continues to set itself apart from its competition. NetApp has always been laser focused on keeping its products simple to manage, sometimes even at the expense of expanding into adjacent markets.
Good examples include NetApp’s decisions not to acquire companies such as Kazeon and Data Domain that both eventually ended up with its chief competitor, EMC. Early on Kazeon worked closely and took very specific steps to integrate, search and discover data on NetApp FAS systems while, in the case of Data Domain, NetApp made the initial offer for it.
However in both of these cases, I suspect NetApp’s endgame was to eventually incorporate the technologies of these two companies into its controllers. So when it became evident that for whatever reason Kazeon did not fit into mold and Data Domain became too pricey, NetApp let them go. In so doing, it potentially even ceded some market share in the near term to avoid making its own product lines more complex to manage and support down the road.
Conversely, NetApp’s acquisitions of Bycast and Spinnaker Technologies fit more neatly into NetApp’s overall framework. NetApp clearly wanted to take their technologies and roll them up into its controllers so they could be managed as a part of the whole.
In other words – NetApp understands what today’s enterprise organizations want. Yes, they want new feature functionality but they do not want to hire more people and add more complexity in order to support it. Rather they want to manage needed new features as a part of what they already do.
So how does all of this relate to this week’s announcement? First, NetApp, in the last couple of years, finished integrating the clustering software from its 2004 Spinnaker Technology acquisition into a prior version of Data ONTAP. This week’s announcement of Data ONTAP 8 and its new Data Motion is one of the first fruits of that integration.
In so doing, enterprise organizations can now non-disruptively move volumes from one controller to another during servicing and upgrades. Further, if a specific volume is on the wrong tier of storage (needs more performance, less performance, etc.), organizations can now migrate it to other NetApp storage that is part of a larger cluster of nodes that Data ONTAP 8 can create and manage.
So while it has taken NetApp a while to bring the clustering software fully to fruition in Data ONTAP 8, it does reflect NetApp’s commitment to keeping new technologies (even one such as this) simple to manage and under its management umbrella.
Second, NetApp is gaining a reputation of becoming a “go-to” vendor for virtualized environments in general and VMware implementations specifically. This announcement further enhances that position in two ways.
NetApp’s new Unified Connect enables organizations to connect virtual machines to its storage systems by giving them the flexibility to use nearly any protocol they want – FCoE, CIFS, NFS or iSCSI – over a single Ethernet wire through a single adapter on a NetApp FAS Series storage system. This limits the number of cables organizations needs to run as well as the number of adapter cards needed on both the server and storage side.
To also ensure that virtual implementations go cleanly, NetApp also announced FlexPod which is a pre-sized, validated data center building block for enterprise data centers. Each FlexPod is designed to support approximately 3,000 – 5,000 users with each FlexPod designed to capitalize on best-of-breed technology from VMware (vSphere and vCenter), Cisco (UCS and Nexus) and, of course, NetApps FAS storage systems.
Finally, NetApp continues to demonstrate with this latest product announcement that it is intent on helping users maximize the use of their available storage resources. While Unified Connect already highlights that commitment, Data ONTAP 8 also introduces Data Compression for higher efficiency for more workloads and improved write performance. These new features taken in conjunction with its existing primary storage Deduplication capabilities highlight its continued emphasis on maximizing storage efficiency.
NetApp has always impressed me with its dedication to first putting the burden on itself to make complex technologies easy to manage and not putting them in front of its customers until they fit into that framework. This announcement reflects those priorities.
Yes, this announcement covers six new high end and midrange storage systems with more capacity and performance. But it more importantly continues to demonstrate that NetApp is in tune with what enterprise organizations want more than ever: complex, cutting edge technologies that their business can use without adding more personnel or complexity into their infrastructure in order to take advantage of it.