Off the grid.

I've taken a week off and dropped off the grid. Being off the grid means not checking the endless flow of work related emails sent directly to me or to one of the any number of internal mail lists I'm on. It means not picking up the phone or my voicemail. It even means limiting myself to industry related browsing for just a few moments a day.

Being off the grid means that the most complex tasks undertaken today involved watering the garden(s) and feeding the fish in the fish pond. Let the rest of it burn until I get back into the office.

Lets have a quick look at what's been going on.

HDS's CEO upped stumps and has run off to join the HP StorageWorks circus. Since Hitachi gave it's blessing one wonders might this be a lead up to killing off the EVA line and replacing it with the AMS?  We'll see how it turns out but lets face it HP storage has been and will continue to be a mess for a long time to come.

NetApp, once Wall Street's unified storage company of steel, had a very bad day recently. Under siege from the usual suspects as well as smaller competitors (3Par, EqualLogic, Isilion) in their core IP Storage market and making zero headway with their SAN and virtualization products (V-series? Lobotomize all your storage except for the NetApp arrays? Oh please. I've also personally helped knock their VTL out of a few accounts recently too so I wasn't surprised to read that business had a bad quarter), they're getting trampled by the industry elephants and eaten alive by the industry ants.

One of NetApp's biggest issues is that EMC sized chip on their shoulder, instead of doubling down in their core markets they've decided to try and invest in all the markets EMC happen to be in. The issue there being that EMC has billions more to invest than NetApp does and far more resources with which to get things done.

The next time someone from NetApp pipes up about facing EMC in every market EMC competes in that sound you're hearing in the background is everyone else, including EMC, eroding their core IP storage base.

Expect Warmenhoven to be throwing even more temper tantrums in public as the year goes by.

Comments

[Chris M Evans]

Netapp are getting all they deserve. Over the last 12 months I've seen their arrogance match almost that of IBM in the mainframe days. Too much of "why wouldn't you buy Netapp" and bypassing technical organisations and hitting CEOs directly - unfortunately p'ing lots of technical people off in the process. Their product simply isn't a SAN competitor.

I worked on one account where Netapp wouldn't sell us a solution rather than sell v-series, which was the perfect product fit for the required solution. Unfortunately that turned me against them for good and its going to take a lot to get me back.

[Storagezilla]

I'm hardly one to be talking about arrogance since I've worked with sales guys who make Ari Gold (From Entourage) look calm & reasonable but it's a comment I've hear echoed a lot.

When I read some of Dave Hitz "We're the underdog" posts it strikes me that there's a disconnect there somewhere. NetApp haven't been an underdog in years and certainly don't act like one these days.

But then the company isn't as nimble as he likes to make out either.