
How Doomed is NetApp? - PaulHoule
http://storagemojo.com/2015/04/13/how-doomed-is-netapp/
======
KaiserPro
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 configure. But they can't do
fast(unless you are just doing small VMs), they can only do block storage, and
FC is a beta product. No real HA.

Pure, Fast, but limited to 250tbs. No metrosync. Block only.

nutanix needs infrastructure upgrade to work at any decent speed. Limited to
VM storage. (I think there is a licensing cost for that from VMware too. )

However that's not to say that netapp are the only show in town. They can be
utterly shit for many tasks. More importantly, if you let them, they'll bleed
you dry. Most people reading this, will never need a system that does block
and file storage. But medium sized boring companies need them.

IBM with GPFS have an interesting product, its just marketed and supported by
morons. Its fairly simple to create a global file system, with geographic data
affinity, that scale linearly when you throw hardware at it. It seriously is
amazing. If it wasn't so held back by IBM, you could have a simple globally
shared filesystem across your entire cloud infrastructure, that's fast (unlike
EBS/EFS/S3)

Object storage is another matter. Object storage is another way of saying that
globally coherent fast posix file access is hard, so here's some thin layers
over a keyvalue store, you do the rest.

Some people do it right (S3, cleversafe) A lot of people do it wrong. There
are important tradeoffs, Like latency, data affinity, or mutability of data.
Like a Netapp, no one system will do everything at the right price.

~~~
Twirrim
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 chasing. I don't mind doing that
to some extent, but the amount of chasing I was having to do left a bad taste
in my mouth and pretty much ensured I've no real interest in dealing with
either vendor again. I wonder if companies really realise the importance of
care even on small contracts. People change jobs all the time these days, and
just because they are buying something small from you now, doesn't mean
they're not going to be interested in something very large in the future. How
you treat them will have a large impact on whether you even get a look in on
something bigger.

~~~
nasalgoat
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?

~~~
KaiserPro
Heh, I had the almost direct opposite experience. However we only had the
netapp for VMware and home directories(and some cache stuff). only added up to
about 300tb. The petabytes were scratch built jobbies. (as no appliance maker
used the super dense 60 drives in 4u cases, despite Netapp making them)

------
drieddust
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 fault. Most systems nowadays uses bigger IO blocks to get
more throughput with less IOPS.

Files on the disk also becomes highy files on the disk. Ironically they
recommend to keep the defragmentation process turned off because there
controller do not have enough comute powere to run the process in production.
This is completed dishonest but very cleaver as it helps them sell more disks
if customer doesn't dig deeper or don't have competence to ask right
questions.

Another laughable design choice. Your size of SSD pool is very limited (12 TB
on a FAS6000 series filer).

~~~
Ecio78
_NetApp do not add any value since Exchange do not need or actually utilise
any of the features._

I never used Exchange on Netapp, but aren't they supposed to have a
"SnapManager for.." tool to coordinate the Exchange backups with the storage
snapshot process? I was using it for SQL Server.

~~~
drieddust
Yes they do have snap manager but backups mostly keep failing. With exchange
2010 you have database, mailbox, and item level redundancy and protection so I
don't actually see the value. S

~~~
Ecio78
HA != backup

you can have whatever redundancy you want, and maybe even lagged copies, but
if you need to restore something months older, you still need backups..

~~~
drieddust
Agreed

Exchange does not needs NetApp HA capabilities if you use multiple copies of
database.

In our case NetApp sold snap manager for 30 remote copies of already triple
redundant (one remote copy) database and then tape backup at month end.

In my view they just fooled the unsuspecting customer and just oversold
everything.

That was fine too if it would have worked.

------
ChuckMcM
As a former NetApp person this makes me sad. I really respect Robin's opinions
and have been following Storage Mojo for years. That Brian Pawlowski left to
join Pure[1] is perhaps the saddest thing. During my tenure there he was
pretty much the heart and soul of engineering. That he left to join a company
that is succeeding with a product that he was tasked with building back at
NetApp [2] boggles my mind.

Connecting the dots on that one leaves me quite amazed.

[1] [http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-
us/news/2402365/p...](http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-
us/news/2402365/pure-storage-nabs-former-netapp-exec-brian-pawlowski)

[2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2013/02/19/how-
neta...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2013/02/19/how-netapp-
flashray-will-disrupt-enterprise-storage-with-low-cost-flash-memory/)

~~~
nathanb
FWIW, I think Robin is just parroting information the Register incorrectly
reported some time ago. The departure of beepy is certainly true, though I
think speculation as to his departure's significance has been a bit over-
dramatic.

I respect Robin's opinions, but these days I don't think his finger is as
firmly on the pulse of the industry as it once was.

------
rodgerd
"File Server Obsolescence" seems wildly unlikely.

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

~~~
lsc
>"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.

------
omerh
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

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

~~~
richmlpdx
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.

------
biturd
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.

~~~
aw3c2
RAM caching.

~~~
halfcat
Yes, but it should be noted that to see this speed up you can only do read
caching. You can do write buffering in RAM but you need to mirror it to
another node or you risk data loss in a power outage situation. RAM-over-
network is roughly equivalent to SSD performance. It should also be noted that
not all SSDs are created equal. You can get an SSD that will do tens of
thousands of IOPS or you can get SSDs that do over a million IOPs per drive.

------
staunch
NetApp can join Sun and Oracle in the pile of great technology that was
massively overpriced and oversold by short-sighted fools.

~~~
CyberDildonics
These companies always seem to find a niche in companies that need hardware
that is 100x faster so they can write software that runs 100x slower.

------
SniperOwl
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.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
What about Simplivity? Do you have any experience/opinion on them?

~~~
SniperOwl
I do not! Would love to hear more info, I am really only commenting on the
hardware I know/own. But I have heard pretty good things about their
replication and how they are neck and neck with Nutanix. I have UCS for my
main sites, and Nutanix for my Remote offices and its working great!

~~~
qthrul
If you have any UCS C240 M3's then you may have SimpliVity options to explore.
[https://www.simplivity.com/products/omnistack-cisco-
ucs/](https://www.simplivity.com/products/omnistack-cisco-ucs/)

------
lnanek2
I went to a cloud dev summit a year ago and they flat out said on stage that
Microsoft and Amazon were under pricing cloud to kill competition. So this is
just as expected...

~~~
chinathrow
I think there is a fine line between under pricing competition and having
exorbitantly high margins.

------
squiguy7
I still think NetApp has a shot with large storage solutions. I got the chance
to intern at one of the newer companies last summer and most of their products
revolved around a hybrid solution of flash and hard disk. One of the customers
kept asking about a storage heavy solution as opposed to having more flash.
Their solution was to buy more appliances which may not be ideal for everyone.

So at the end of the day, if you still need lots of disk, I suppose NetApp has
a lot to offer.

------
hrez
Sure, if all you need is block or object storage there are many alternatives.
But if you need NAS which satisfies basic requirements (performant, NFS, HA,
snapshots, writable snapshots) it's hard to find better than Netapp. All I've
seen is poorly integrated NAS gateways on top of block storage. Perhaps Oracle
ZFS is somewhat close.

------
chronophage
Cleversafe seems to be eating NetApp's lunch.

~~~
KaiserPro
Different products for different things.

Netapp are not growing like they should, but its not cleversafe knicking the
money.

What cleversafe do that is unique is create a global encrypted, highly
available, redundant namespace. If you want a fast safe redundant backup
system (and don't mind using API access) then cleversafe is your goto product.

Netapp doesn't do anything similar.

~~~
chronophage
You don't think that the shift from traditional RAID / NAS to object storage
isn't really what's hurting them?

~~~
KaiserPro
not really. I think its Nimble and the like. Much cheaper, better interfaces.

------
qthrul
Only on a Saturday would this make it to the top of HN.

~~~
madiator
I am curious why you said that?

~~~
ende
This is just a guess, but maybe because our CIOs all screen our web traffic
and would be offended to learn they wasted so much money on these products?

Crap I left my VPN on!!!

