NetApp look to maintain momentum
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While many technology vendors have blamed the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York for a downturn in financial performance, Network Appliance CFO Steve Gomo suggests that it had precisely the opposite effect in the data storage industry.
While many technology vendors have blamed the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York for a downturn in financial performance, Network Appliance chief financial officer Steve Gomo suggests that it had precisely the opposite effect in the data storage industry.
What followed, fuelled by the dramatic unravelling of energy trading giant Enron, was a tightening of regulations that had customers running to re-write their document retention policies - making them more cautious - and to upgrade their storage facilities.
NetApp has benefited by offering a unified network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) device.
The unifying factor is the iSCSI Internet protocol-based technology that is increasingly being used instead of the expensive and often proprietary fibre channel traditionally used in SAN products. It is now becoming fast enough to be able to challenge fibre channel for performance. Such NAS/SAN products have helped NetApp to grow at twice the rate of market leader EMC and at three times the 12% rate of the market as a whole. And Gomo does not expect this kind of growth to slow down.
"There is still a lot of direct-attached storage out there too and the reason why it has not moved to NAS is that it is too expensive," says Gomo. "iSCSI allows you to serve block-based information over an existing protocol, such as the Internet. Better asset utilisation is achieved and server farms can be consolidated."
Virtualisation is another technology that NetApp is planning to exploit, with the release of Data ONTAP 7G, storage 'grid' software intended to harness a large number of storage devices together and run them as if they were a single unit.
However, virtualisation and grid software is widely regarded as immature and users report difficulties in making different vendors' devices work together. Indeed, virtualisation would inevitably complete the commoditisation of storage, reducing the prices vendors could charge - and their profit margins.
That will certainly favour customers, but for vendors like NetApp, survival depends on being among the biggest and most efficient when virtualisation goes mainstream.
