Network Appliance Inc.'s (NetApp) senior vice president and general
manager of the Emerging Products Group, Jay Kidd, is on a whirlwind
tour of North America. Last week he could be seen heading up a
session at Storage Networking World (SNW) in San Diego on
heterogeneous storage management; this week found him in our
offices just outside Boston discussing topics, such as
storage virtualization, clustered network
attached storage (NAS) and NetApp's struggle with defining
itself as it expands beyond its beginnings as a NAS company.
Virtualization has been a hot topic in the industry of late.
What's your take as a NAS player on file virtualization?
Jay Kidd: In the file virtualization space, the NeoPaths,
the Acopia's, Rainfinity -- none of them did all that well. If you
put all those companies together, I doubt there's a dollar of
profit in that entire set of businesses. We believe that there's a
place for a virtualization engine at that layer, but mainly it's
used for migration, typically lease-end migration. Some customers
who are doing frequent migrations may buy the infrastructure, but
it's not a big market.
NetApp was partnered with NuView before Brocade bought them, and we
didn't acquire that technology for a variety of reasons. Brocade
did, and we're fine with that. We resell that actively -- in
customer environments where they want to have a unified namespace
across multiple filers, both NetApp and others. Then, having a
host-based unification point makes a lot of sense. Within
NetApp-only environments, our clustered system provides that
unified namespace.
It's been suggested that the NetApp V-Series could be
positioned to compete with the Hitachi Tagmastore in data center
virtualization. What's your take on that?
Kidd: That is exactly what it is. We can put multiple
different arrays behind it. Where we caution people is, if you move
toward the level of having a single device, let's say it's
virtualizing six arrays behind it, that device needs to have the
performance and availability of the aggregate -- it has to be six
times better than each array behind it.
So is NetApp taking a wait and see approach? Is
virtualization going the way of ILM?
Kidd: The hottest thing going on right now in the data
center is server virtualization. But what server virtualization is
really about is consolidation. The same phenomenon existed in data
center storage in the late 90s, and that's really what drove the
movement toward networked storage. So now you've got consolidated
servers, consolidated storage. Server virtualization has been a
great thing for network storage, because VMware means the death of
DAS.
Is it driving people to storage virtualization?
Kidd: Not necessarily. I don't think there's enough of a
market for a single device that would support petabytes of storage
behind it -- generally with storage, users want to have pools of
sufficient scale that they have flexibility in terms of how they
provision it, but they also want to mitigate risk by not having all
their eggs in one basket. They want to have separate pools.
So how does that jibe with the utility view of
storage?
Kidd: I think the essence of utility computing is that
it's going to be laid out more like the Internet, where you have
many-to-many infrastructure with many storage devices, many network
devices, many host devices, rather than a big old bottleneck.
There'll be intelligence in all of the end devices to know how to
find their storage within that grid. This type of scheme is
ultimately more scalable.
So where does NetApp fit into that vision?
Kidd: This is a new area of indexes and directories.
There are several data management products on the market that
create an index of your data -- we offer Kazeon's product. I think
you'll see a lot of excitement around indexing -- you'll start to
see different tiers of data classification. Indexing will be at the
core of a lot of new products, and over time, it'll work its way
into storage devices as well. This is where I think storage
virtualization is focused too much on simplifying the physical. I
think if you raise it up a level, you can simplify the logical,
even with more complex physical pieces.
What kind of traction are you seeing with your GX clustered
NAS product?
Kidd: We've had OnTap GX shipping for about a year, and
there's good customer engagement with it. We've targeted
high-performance compute environments, environments that have big
data problems and need a lot of capacity and performance. It's not
necessarily an enterprise focus now. We find generally database,
Exchange and SAP users aren't looking for a clustered controller.
They're looking for something a little more traditional, where the
economics of the storage are compelling. but it's not a whole new
different type of architecture.
Are you starting to compete with Isilon?
Kidd: I don't think we realized we were competing with
Isilon until they said we were competing with them. We didn't
really see them much in the markets and accounts we were selling
into.
Doesn't that mean you were missing a whole customer segment
then? Isilon has gone public on the strength of that
market.
Kidd: That's a fair comment. I wish that we were big
enough to invest in every single segment. About three years ago we
really targeted the enterprise segment and wanted to build a
business there, and we had presence in the technical segments. Did
we leave some segments unattended? Yeah, we probably did. And
Isilon has gone and found those segments and called our attention
to them.
It's a challenge to balance, because even though we're growing
35% a year, we can't invest in everything we'd like to. We're doing
more things right now -- we've broadened the focus in the past year
or so to be back on the technical side again. One area where I
think we haven't done much of anything is just building awareness
-- a level of brand identity. Who is NetApp? Our technical buyers
understood us, but as we've shifted into other markets, we're not
as well understood.
So, who is NetApp?
Kidd: That's what we're figuring out now. We have ideas
and will pursue ideas, and there will be disagreement and dissent
even within the company about what we should pursue. We debate it
very openly.
We know it'll be around simplicity. We know it'll be around data
management in storage. We know it won't be limited to a single
market. It's not a change in our perception -- it's an expansion.
We're not just NAS -- that isn't going to be our tagline,
obviously, but it's the truth. But the finer points of that
identity are what we're going through an exercise now to really
refine.