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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 abl

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 12y ago
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.
- douche 12y ago
  Sounds like IBM... They can be pretty dysfunctional.
- liveoneggs 12y ago
  Yes. NetApp products tend to be really great but dealing with their sales guys directly sucks. Next time contact an VAR like Vandis who will size it, sell it, and help (or just do) set it up.
  - omerh 12y ago
    I agree, I had to chase them for more than 2 weeks to get a disk shelf quote which was overpriced around $3k competing with a local vendor that buys from them. I bought from a vendor and not directly from Netapp
- nasalgoat 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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)
- acdha 12y ago
  The reverse is true, too. After IBM couldn't even send a quote for a seven-figure purchase, we went with Sun's amd64 servers. For years, they got additional business because the process was to email or call & wait 10 minutes for a detailed quote which was correct on the first try. Every so often we tried to get IBM or HP involved but their sales guys talked us out of it within the first 15 minutes.
madsushi 12y ago
(disclaimer, former NetApp and Nimble VAR) NetApp is beat regularly for being too slow to new markets. Compellent was beating them in deals every day with Automated Storage Tiering (AST) and NetApp didn't respond (Compellent was acquired by Dell). If SSDs hadn't come along, Compellent would still be eating their lunch. Then Nimble started beating them in deals every day with cheap SSD. NetApp only offered big monolithic PCI-E flash cards with a huge markup / licensing cost, while Nimble let you leverage "cheap" SSDs in a direct and scalable way. Nimble would give you a SAN with SSDs for $20k, where NetApp couldn't include their PAM flash card in any array under $40-50k. $20k of disk and SSD beats $20k of just disk most places. The new tech (SSDs) took NetApp several years to leverage. Even though NetApp's tooling, software, and capabilities were light years ahead, people could "make do" with Nimble and cheap SSDs. NetApp has only recently added reasonably priced SSDs to the mix. NetApp regularly billed itself to partners as a "software company" who differentiated itself with software. They still have some of the most robust software in the business for encryption, replication, compliance, and orchestration. Their suite blows Nimble out of the water. But more and more, people are OK with running cheap, dumb, fast SANs and leveraging software on the other side (Windows, OpenStack, VMware) to handle storage intelligence. As a hardware company, they're too slow and charging huge margins for consumer-available parts won't work forever. As a software company, their rivals in the non-storage world are quickly preparing to make them obsolete with server-side storage intelligence. Tough place to be, outside of enterprises who need your software stack (custom replication / cloning, retention, etc).
cenal 12y ago
Nexenta can do all this on on commodity hardware. Also checkout what http://www.ixsystems.com http://www.ixsystems.com is up to if you want to see what they have done with FreeNAS.
- KaiserPro 12y ago
  I have several peers who use nexenta, whilst I love ZFS, unless I had the staff budget I'd never recommend it. Considering its just a thin wrapper round samba and linux(or illumos, I can never remember), the support should be much better.
Ecio78 12y ago
I agree with what you said. I used Netapp around 2007 in one bank as iSCSI storage for a SQL Server solution, and later on in 2008 we selected it for a small online bank (80 employees,500 financial advisors, 20-30k customers) as crucial part of our infrastructure. We were able to design the IT infrastructure around it using it as CIFS file servers for internal Windows users, NFS datastore for the VMware infrastructure (we were almost all virtual) and iSCSI block access for some special machines (e.g. SQL Server) with relevant software in place for backups and with full sync metrocluster replica between the two sites. No FC host-access. It was clearly expensive, maybe not that exceptional performance-wise, but I'm quite sure even today you can't do it with all the new fancy storage vendors.At that time, we could have done it with EMC, but our experience with the sales process was opposite to the one reported by some here: during the 1st purchase for SQL, I was able to find a Netapp pre-sales technical guy that was very competent, while I struggled to get the right replies from an EMC reseller. EDIT: I think I should probably add that the competent Netapp pre-sales guy moved to DataDomain, then Fusion-IO and now he's in PureStorage..
omerh 12y ago
Yes, Netapp does CIFS alot better than the rest. But you can always setup a File server cluster and run it on any storage you want. A bit of a hassle on setup but there is an alternative.
- KaiserPro 12y ago
  but the important thing to remember is that kind of setup requires OPEX to run.

Twirrim 12y ago

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.

douche 12y ago
Sounds like IBM... They can be pretty dysfunctional.
liveoneggs 12y ago
Yes. NetApp products tend to be really great but dealing with their sales guys directly sucks. Next time contact an VAR like Vandis who will size it, sell it, and help (or just do) set it up.
- omerh 12y ago
  I agree, I had to chase them for more than 2 weeks to get a disk shelf quote which was overpriced around $3k competing with a local vendor that buys from them. I bought from a vendor and not directly from Netapp
nasalgoat 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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)
acdha 12y ago
The reverse is true, too. After IBM couldn't even send a quote for a seven-figure purchase, we went with Sun's amd64 servers. For years, they got additional business because the process was to email or call & wait 10 minutes for a detailed quote which was correct on the first try. Every so often we tried to get IBM or HP involved but their sales guys talked us out of it within the first 15 minutes.

madsushi 12y ago

(disclaimer, former NetApp and Nimble VAR) NetApp is beat regularly for being too slow to new markets. Compellent was beating them in deals every day with Automated Storage Tiering (AST) and NetApp didn't respond (Compellent was acquired by Dell). If SSDs hadn't come along, Compellent would still be eating their lunch. Then Nimble started beating them in deals every day with cheap SSD. NetApp only offered big monolithic PCI-E flash cards with a huge markup / licensing cost, while Nimble let you leverage "cheap" SSDs in a direct and scalable way. Nimble would give you a SAN with SSDs for $20k, where NetApp couldn't include their PAM flash card in any array under $40-50k. $20k of disk and SSD beats $20k of just disk most places. The new tech (SSDs) took NetApp several years to leverage. Even though NetApp's tooling, software, and capabilities were light years ahead, people could "make do" with Nimble and cheap SSDs. NetApp has only recently added reasonably priced SSDs to the mix. NetApp regularly billed itself to partners as a "software company" who differentiated itself with software. They still have some of the most robust software in the business for encryption, replication, compliance, and orchestration. Their suite blows Nimble out of the water. But more and more, people are OK with running cheap, dumb, fast SANs and leveraging software on the other side (Windows, OpenStack, VMware) to handle storage intelligence. As a hardware company, they're too slow and charging huge margins for consumer-available parts won't work forever. As a software company, their rivals in the non-storage world are quickly preparing to make them obsolete with server-side storage intelligence. Tough place to be, outside of enterprises who need your software stack (custom replication / cloning, retention, etc).

cenal 12y ago

Nexenta can do all this on on commodity hardware. Also checkout what http://www.ixsystems.com http://www.ixsystems.com is up to if you want to see what they have done with FreeNAS.

KaiserPro 12y ago
I have several peers who use nexenta, whilst I love ZFS, unless I had the staff budget I'd never recommend it. Considering its just a thin wrapper round samba and linux(or illumos, I can never remember), the support should be much better.

Ecio78 12y ago

I agree with what you said. I used Netapp around 2007 in one bank as iSCSI storage for a SQL Server solution, and later on in 2008 we selected it for a small online bank (80 employees,500 financial advisors, 20-30k customers) as crucial part of our infrastructure. We were able to design the IT infrastructure around it using it as CIFS file servers for internal Windows users, NFS datastore for the VMware infrastructure (we were almost all virtual) and iSCSI block access for some special machines (e.g. SQL Server) with relevant software in place for backups and with full sync metrocluster replica between the two sites. No FC host-access. It was clearly expensive, maybe not that exceptional performance-wise, but I'm quite sure even today you can't do it with all the new fancy storage vendors.At that time, we could have done it with EMC, but our experience with the sales process was opposite to the one reported by some here: during the 1st purchase for SQL, I was able to find a Netapp pre-sales technical guy that was very competent, while I struggled to get the right replies from an EMC reseller. EDIT: I think I should probably add that the competent Netapp pre-sales guy moved to DataDomain, then Fusion-IO and now he's in PureStorage..

omerh 12y ago

Yes, Netapp does CIFS alot better than the rest. But you can always setup a File server cluster and run it on any storage you want. A bit of a hassle on setup but there is an alternative.

KaiserPro 12y ago
but the important thing to remember is that kind of setup requires OPEX to run.