NetApp hits back at Wikibon in cluster fluster bunfight

'Storage focus is important and sustainable' says irate firm

Comment The Wikibon consultancy has published an analysis saying that the move from NetApp's ONTAP 7-mode to clustered mode (cDOT) wasn't worth it, and suggesting ONTAP was not a great choice in several application areas.

NetApp's Lee Caswell, VP product, solutions and services marketing, sent us the following riposte.

The Wikibon analysis can be seen as a sustained attack on a single company and its main product. It seems right in this circumstance that the company should have the opportunity to respond and to have that response unfiltered by us. Here is what Caswell sent us:

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It’s not often we see an industry analyst target a company or a product in the way David Floyer from Wikibon did in a recent column regarding our company, NetApp, and our clustered Data ONTAP software, commonly known as cDOT.

While we agree with many of Floyer’s insights about the importance of flash and cloud, we, like our customers, come to radically different conclusions when factoring in the way our products actually work.

Let’s take a look at where the facts lead.

Flash is indeed a game-changer and cDOT is poised to win

CDOT, like HP 3PAR, was designed for high-speed I/O, not specifically for flash. What Floyer missed was the comprehensive cDOT flash performance and storage efficiency optimizations that have made our All Flash FAS (AFF) platform, which cDOT underpins, one of the fastest growing products in NetApp history. These flash enhancements deliver world-class, independently verified SPC-1 benchmark results for low-latency workloads, where Oracle workloads represent nearly 40 per cent of existing customer applications.

Floyer advises customers to keep low-latency workloads on existing infrastructure; recent data shows our customers are using flash and cDOT to accomplish exactly the opposite outcome. They are offloading performance workloads from outdated SANs and consolidating these workloads onto cDOT to take advantage of simpler management. The original promise of unified storage resonates, with low-latency flash performance that is investment-protected for the cloud.

It’s also worth noting that NetApp minimizes transition costs to cDOT with transition tools such as Copy Free Transition that reduce costs and free transition gear programs for customers. And the value of cDOT includes integrated flash and cloud capabilities along with application integration, synchronous replication, integration with disk for backup, FlexPod integration with Cisco ACI, and on and on.

Let’s dive more fully into this cloud aspect.

Cloud is critically important and cDOT offers choice

We agree that integration with the cloud is critical but don’t see why giving up control is a good outcome for customers. The Wikibon fictional “true private cloud” with integrated stacks is what customers historically call “vendor lock-in” with all the financial downsides customers despise.

Floyer completely ignores the ways that NetApp has assured that cDOT delivers integration with the cloud. Our customers routinely share capacity-efficient snapshots across flash, disk and cloud resources with a common management interface. This is core to the NetApp Data Fabric strategy, which offers data mobility and common management regardless of where data resides. With cDOT, customers can train once and share data across engineered platforms, whitebox hardware, or in the public cloud. The portfolio even goes so far as to offer caching into private or public cloud targets with storage efficiencies.

How does the acquisition of SolidFire play into the cDOT story?

A dedicated storage focus is good for customers

The flash market is exploding and we believe customers want a storage provider who can deliver a portfolio that meets their needs for speed, scale and rich data services.

For Oracle customers needing the lowest latency and density, our EF product delivers the speed, with sub-millisecond response times, proven reliability and a compact density profile that thrills the most demanding DBAs. For virtualised Oracle instances running in large systems of record, our cDOT-based AFF all-flash array offers rich data services for storage admins looking for SAN performance married with NetApp’s storied management simplicity.

We cannot release more details of the SolidFire integration until the transaction is complete, but we have shared how new cloud-like deployment models favor the simple physical and logical scale-out architecture that SolidFire introduces with whitebox economics. It’s clearly an incremental market opportunity that has been identified by partners and customers.

So we come to a different conclusion – storage focus is important and sustainable.

It doesn’t stop with storage – a “best of breed” approach with FlexPod

For partners that want a fuller stack of network and compute, we deploy a “best of breed” strategy by partnering with industry leader Cisco to promote FlexPod with validated architectures, partner support and leading strategies ranging from life-cycle management, to ACI software defined networking, to one-touch provisioning. We’re finding strong interest in flash-based cloud-protected FlexPod as the new capabilities become known and as customers assess the risks of the Dell/EMC impact on VBlock and VCE futures.

It’s time for everyone to take a closer look at NetApp

We’re helping partners and customers build next-generation infrastructure that meets their desired mix of flash, disk, and cloud resources. Our Data Fabric pulls it all together with the industry’s best data management. We encourage all customers to take a new look at NetApp and explore the value of our full range of flash and cloud innovations. The Wikibon article does not give you an update that’s accurate. Talk to us, and find out how our all-flash portfolio, coupled with our Data Fabric strategy, gives you complete control across flash, disk and cloud resources. ®