Two managing directors from top Australian firms go head to head on critical storage issues facing the industry.
GREEN: How is EMC going to maintain its income levels now that users are turning away in droves from your traditional directly-connected storage model in favour of the NetApp-pioneered fabric attached model?
REDMAN: EMC's income levels are not just maintaining--they are increasing. In addition, EMC is gaining share in networked storage daily, both locally and globally. EMC doesn't promote the direct connect storage model. We promote automated networked storage. According to IDC, EMC has grown to 45 percent market share in networked storage--twice that of our nearest competitor, HP. We are also ahead on plan both locally and globally, and in ANZ this year alone have added 50 new customers.
REDMAN: If you claim Network Appliance NAS is a solution for enterprise, and you have a SAN solution, why do you also resell the HDS Enterprise SAN (who in turn resell with Sun and HP)?
GREEN: Many customers have large investments in their enterprise SANs. Some want to add filer functionality to their data centre, utilising their SAN infrastructure. Others have excess SAN storage capacity and want to utilise that capacity before purchasing more. NetApp's enterprise-class NAS gateway front-ending a HDS SAN meets the needs of these customers.
HDS approached Network Appliance to provide a NAS gateway front-end for their Hitachi Freedom Storage system environments to enable their customers to leverage NetApp's high performing and scalable storage solutions. With this gateway, HDS customers can now consolidate disparate SAN, NAS, and DAS islands into a common open storage pool to reduce complexity, lower storage management costs and provide better storage asset utilisation.
GREEN: Wouldn't EMC's acquisition of Legato adversely impact that company's long-held and highly valued hardware-agnostic stance in the marketplace and thereby destroy its value?
REDMAN: No, both EMC and Legato provide hardware-independent management software and will continue to do so.
EMC's stated vision is 50:30:20 (which is the proportion of our revenue coming from hardware, software, and service, respectively). EMC has described its open storage management strategy for over two years.
Software is the area that adds value to the customer, other than just selling them storage, with software and implementation as an after thought. EMC is the market leader in storage software and the Legato acquisition will solidify our software solution suite.
In addition to that, customers ask EMC to help manage data throughout its entire life cycle (from creation, to active use, to archival, to deletion). Like all complex issues, this is not simply a point product but requires a product strategy. EMC has delivered on products such as Centera which helps in this strategy. Legato has some excellent technology in the area of lifecycle storage management which will complement EMC's Automated Networked strategy.
REDMAN: Where is your support centre in Australia?
GREEN: For all customers, Network Appliance follows a 24x7 follow-the-sun model with primary support centres in India, Europe, United States East Coast, and United States West Coast.
| -NetApp's SAN strategy enables us to serve dual markets while enabling customers to standardise on one vendor and one operating system to dramatically lower their storage costs." |
As you'd expect in this day and age, support is available online whenever needed. For example, our comprehensive NOW Web site is available anytime, anywhere. It features an array of self-service tools that give you the information you need to manage your storage. You have access to online technical assistance, the latest software releases and patches, and a large knowledge base. You can manage your software and hardware support agreements, increase your knowledge of NetApp products through online training, and share information with colleagues and partners through interactive learning sessions.
If customers prefer, Australia and New Zealand users can speak to experts in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and Wellington but they are mostly supported online.
GREEN: How is ROI of storage technologies affecting purchasing decisions for disaster recovery solutions?
REDMAN: Many organisations see DR as an expensive insurance policy. According to Gartner, EMC had over 55 percent of the replication software market in 2002. Through this experience in providing DR solutions for the largest organisations in the world, EMC has worked with many customers to ensure a ROI through providing solutions that enable customers to spread their load across two or more physical sites thereby making productive use of the DR infrastructure while at the same time providing a DR solution that meets the business requirements.
REDMAN: What is your partnership position with Microsoft? SAN is its strategic direction--are you therefore competing with Microsoft?
GREEN: Network Appliance and Microsoft have an extensive business and technical relationship based on innovation, interoperability, and support. Network Appliance is strategically committed to architecting storage solutions that are highly compatible with Microsoft technologies.
Tight integration of licensed Windows protocols, and complete compatibility with Windows OS enhancements as well as Microsoft applications are Network Appliance development priorities. These solutions are backed by a global customer support infrastructure that integrates Microsoft premier support and technical account management.
Our addressable market is Fabric Attached Storage, or FAS. FAS includes both NAS and SAN, with the NAS segment including both Unix and Windows, and the SAN segment including both Fibre Channel and iSCSI. We fulfil the requirements of the FAS market with our unified storage platform, which supports data storage and management across heterogeneous server platforms regardless of the protocol or wire.
GREEN: Will the enterprise storage market consolidate over the next two years? Why? If so, how?
REDMAN: The market is aggressively consolidating now and will continue to do so. When all costs are considered (labour etc), customers get a better TCO from consolidated networked storage. Gartner, IDC, and our customers agree with this.
| -EMC sees virtualisation simply as abstracting or hiding underlying complexities from the user interface and it is a part of our automated networked storage strategy." |
EMC is uniquely positioned in such environments with its depth of knowledge in both SAN-based (FC) and NAS-based (IP) technologies.
Mixed storage networks, however, could cause more complexity. Therefore an area of consolidation with even more importance is storage management. Customers need simpler ways of managing complex underlying technologies, they want a single tool to manage their diverse hardware and storage network layers. We are a long way down this path already and the Legato acquisition is a prime example of how we will further consolidate management into a set of simple, open, automated tools.
REDMAN: What is your plan for adopting new useful technologies such as iSCSI or content addressed storage APIs? Will you continue to position your technology as the tool to fit all situations?
GREEN: We are constantly innovating and developing solutions. We have achieved market leadership in nearline ATA systems (NearStore) for a variety of backup/restore and archiving needs, NDMP, VI, InfiniBand, 10GbE, HTML, CIM, and DAFS architectures. Obviously when each new technology or standard is delivered, we evaluate and determine if it's appropriate technology to be included into a NetApp solution and if it will deliver demonstrable customer value.
All our solutions use the same Data ONTAP kernel, which with more than 10 years development under our belt provides the architecture our customers desire.
NetApp actively participates in industry consortiums that seek to develop common and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We've thrown our support behind the Direct Access File System (DAFS) and we were the first storage company to offer a solution incorporating iSCSI. We have also opened up our own APIs through our Advantage Developers' Program, with the goal of providing additional integration of our solutions with other solutions on the market--all in the name of giving customers maximum choice and flexibility.
GREEN: How do customers deploying networked storage leverage their existing Ethernet and IP investments? Should they stick with open industry standards?
REDMAN: Customers should stick with open industry standards. EMC is one of the long-term supporters of SNIA, which is the industry body driving open industry standards globally.
Now that iSCSI is certified we will start to see iSCSI solutions coming to market which will enable users to leverage existing investments in IP infrastructure.
Customers should consider that moving to iSCSI technologies, while expected to be cheaper than FC, may require investment in additional IP infrastructure in order to carry the additional data load. We expect most iSCSI implementations to exist on separate IP storage networks rather than on the existing data/LAN networks. Obviously, this depends on the application. Being the number one or two player in SAN and NAS, EMC is well positioned to serve our customers.
FC SANs, iSCSI SANs, and NAS all provide different levels of service for information at different price points. EMC together with our customers can understand the service level requirements and suggest the right solution rather than fit NAS or SAN into all requirements.
REDMAN: What SAN interoperability testing has Network Appliance undertaken? How much have you invested (in people and money terms) in creating an interoperability testing facility?
GREEN: NetApp formally supports the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) new interoperability standard CIM-SAN-1, or Bluefin, and our flagship FAS900 series has successfully been tested against this industry standard.
NetApp's support for this standard highlights our strong track record in delivering robust, interoperable management tools that make it easy to control vast mission-critical and often geographically distributed storage resources.
NetApp's SAN strategy enables us to serve dual markets while enabling customers to standardise on one vendor and one operating system to dramatically lower their storage costs.
GREEN: What is EMC's take on storage virtualisation? Is it a reality?
REDMAN: Yes, virtualisation is a reality today and will continue to develop. I am surprised anyone would think it won't play a major part this decade. Virtualisation is a concept to do with removing complexity. For example, when operating systems had too many volumes to track, logical volume managers were introduced to reduce the complexity.
Virtualisation is nothing new in the storage industry and has been delivered under various names. The first storage virtualisation really came about in the early '90s with the production of RAID disk controllers like EMC's Symmetrix storage array in 1990.
EMC has pioneered a number of virtualisation products. PowerPath removes the complexity of balancing and managing failover of paths between the server and storage.
In recent times virtualisation has been marketed as different things by different vendors.
EMC sees virtualisation simply as abstracting or hiding underlying complexities from the user interface and it is a part of our automated networked storage strategy.
This co-ordination is and always has been the goal of EMC's AutoIS strategy which will deliver a single tool to automate management of all underlying complexities associated with storage. This is an end-to-end strategy server, storage network and storage platform, all a virtual pool.
REDMAN: Most current NetApp environments are distributed. Gartner and IDC say distributed environments have only 30 percent asset utilisation. How does this save your customers money?
GREEN: A typical storage deployment which is direct-attached will experience low capacity utilisation due to the non-sharing nature of those resources across networks. NetApp deployments solve not only this physical connectivity/sharing/geography issue--via the same technology that EMC calls a "storage network"--but drives management costs down too. IDC/Gartner have shown this to be a much more significant component of costs.
Distributed environments can mean wide-area networks, where the physical distance restrictions of Fibre Channel are impossible to deliver economically.
The use of Ethernet or IP across existing network infrastructures and even copper wires is a service that exists in almost every corner of the globe. By connecting to and leveraging existing Ethernet and network infrastructure investments, NetApp's storage devices are then easily virtualised or pooled and viewed as one storage source using storage management software, in turn doing away with the need for costly direct-connect storage models, while ensuring existing storage is utilised to its fullest extent.
By viewing the distributed storage pools as virtualised storage, NetApp's customers dramatically lower their storage costs and TCO.
Distributed storage pools also make data migration and multi-platform data access easier. The same pool of storage on a NetApp system can connect to Windows, Linux, or UNIX servers, for example, and the data can be fully utilised in either mode. This represents another management as well as cost saving.
GREEN: What will the impact on EMC's brand be at the lower end where Dell storage is deployed? How do you see Dell impacting on your ability to deliver value to your high number of resellers?
REDMAN: Dell has a great brand, as does EMC. This is the "best case scenario" of two leaders working together. Customers have confidence working with leaders, and this partnership brings two great leaders together to bring the best of both companies to our customers. I believe that here is a true example of 1+1=3.
We believe this relationship adds to customer choice, which can only be a good thing for our customers.
EMC have a number of partners each of which provide their own different specialisation as their value on top of the EMC Automated Networked Storage they are providing. Where Dell brings its substantial server market presence and manufacturing capabilities, other partners may provide their own integration knowledge and experience to a total networked storage solution.
REDMAN: What is your golf handicap?
GREEN: I don't have time for golf.
GREEN: Why wouldn't BRW let you wear a tie?
REDMAN: We have a number of customers who see us as a very "East Coast" culture, so I thought I'd try to be a bit of a "West Coast" guy, but, judging from the cover, it seems everyone's gone back to being the "professional guy" and the solid professional is back... Obviously it didn't work as I ended up on the inside cover! Plus, my neck was too big.
 About Network Appliance Network Appliance Inc is a world leader in unified storage solutions for today's data-intensive enterprise. It has 2400 employees worldwide. |
 About EMC EMC Corporation is one of the world's leading providers of enterprise storage systems, software, and services. EMC employs more than 17,000 people worldwide and 280 in Australia. |
3%
2%
