who's who in SSD? - Network Appliance NetApp


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Network Appliance

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and achieve outstanding cost efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

See also:- NetApp mentions on StorageSearch.com, NetApp's flash storage overview

how fast can your SSD run backwards?
Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage
High availability fault tolerant SSD arrays market
Decloaking hidden segments in the enterprise for rackmount SSDs
Compared to EMC... ours is better - can you take these AFA startups seriously?

editor:- January 8, 2016 - NetApp would have been ranked 43 in the Q3 2014 sampling period of the Top SSD Companies List which is researched and published by StorageSearch.com. The published list typically shows the top 25 companies. NetApp has never appeared in the main list - which has tracked the SSD market for 9 years.

Like NetApp, old established technology companies which have been regarded as having no influence on the future of SSD market thinking (or which have lower rankings than they think they need to secure their SSD futures) have come under considerable pressure in recent years to acquire SSD companies while they still have the financial resources to enable this and before the market finally consolidates (which will make entry costs prohibitively high).

who's who in SSD? - Network Appliance

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com - November 2013

Like many other big name enterprise companies from the HDD array era - and for many of the same reasons - Network Appliance was a me-too (late) follower rather than a leader in the SSD market in the first decade of flash in the enterprise (2004 to 2013).

For those reasons its interim business strategy has mostly been a mixture of acquisition, and oeming 3rd party SSDs rather than advancing SSD architecture with its own unique designs.

NetApp has never appeared in the fastest SSD lists nor in StorageSearch.com's 7 year running series the top 10 SSD companies, nor in the lowest price SSDs.

If you're looking at NetApp for SSDs you may also be interested in looking at these articles for alternative suppliers:- SSDs ASAPs (Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage), rackmount SSDs and PCIe SSDs.

Despite a late and slow start in solid state storage there's no doubt that NetApp is a fount of knowledge when it comes to network storage architecture related to rotating storage arrays.

Something which may have helped was the company's 2003 acquisition of patents from the world's first NAS company Auspex Systems - whose Storage Architecture Guide (published in 2000) remains a classic reference which has been read by hundreds of thousands of our readers.

NetApp mentions in SSD Market History

In November 2008 - published details of its thinking re SSDs.

NetApp's paper - Flash Memory Technology in Enterprise Storage (pdf) didn't actually say much beyond the fact they're qualifying some products and will launch systems offerings which include flash SSDs sometime in 2009.

In February 2009 - Network Appliance announced 2 strands in its solid state storage acceleration strategy:-

support for the RamSan-500 flash SSD array (from Texas Memory Systems' ) via NetApp's V-Series storage controller and also

a new Performance Acceleration Module which provides a read cache (16GB to 80GB) implemented by PCI Express DRAM cards.

Although NetApp's PAM is a PCIe RAM card and not a PCIe flash SSD - it's just a short walk from one to the other - which is why I've mentioned it here. I have little doubt the company has already been evaluating options in this market space.

In June 2010 - Network Appliance disclosed that it had shipped more than a petabyte of flash SSD acceleration storage since introducing the product 9 months earlier. See also:- SSD petabyte milestones

In November 2013 - Network Appliance disclosed it had has shipped over 59 petabytes of flash storage in the past 3 years.

In December 2015 - Network Appliance agreed to acquire SolidFire for $870 million.

...

NetApp acquires Software-Defined Memory

In May 2017 - A report on NoCamels.com said that Network Appliance has agreed to buy Plexistor for $20 million.

Editor's comments:- Plexistor's claim to fame was Software-Defined Memory - with a chip agnostic approach to SCM DIMM wars and the memoryfication of the enterprise.

This acquisition will enable NetApp to play around with options on that adoption curve in speculative system offerings without risking too much wasted software in memory dead ends

"AFAs everywhere" are a transient market stopover and no longer the final destination.

after AFAs - what's next?

Many factors at play in enterprise SSD market behavior still don't appear as explicit assumptions in SSD product marketing plans.

Decloaking hidden segments in the enterprise

NetApp acquires SolidFire

Editor:- December 21, 2015 - Network Appliance has agreed to acquire SolidFire for $870 million in cash according to an announcement today - which also said that "with SolidFire, NetApp will now have all-flash offerings that address each of the 3 largest AFA market segments."

Editor's comments:- I had been expecting at least one SSD company to be acquired in December as this has become something of a tradition in recent years.

December 2014 - Western Digital acquired Skyera.

December 2013 - Avago acquired LSI.

December 2012 - Samsung acquired NVELO.

December 2011 - Apple acquired Anobit.

Now consider this... 90% of the enterprise SSD companies which you know have no good reasons to survive.

towards consolidation in the enterprise SSD market

NetApp says - the time for taking risks with enterprise flash startups is over

Editor:- October 1, 2014 - Demise of the flash startups is the provocative title of a recent blog by Craig Alger at NetApp - who asserts that the "brief window of time where fast and agile (enterprise SSD) startups can get the jump on large, slow manufacturers" has now ended.

Craig questions how startups like Pure and Tegile can expect to compete now that "titans of the industry" such as NetApp, and EMC (and by implication IBM, Dell, and HP too) have got their flash toys, acquired, oemed, licensed and integrated neatly within vast product catalogs?

Editor's comments:- If you agree with Craig's premise - that all the disruptive innovation is now over - then you'd probably also agree that it's not worth taking risks with new enterprise SSD startups. Just stick with the big safe vendors and you'll be OK.

You won't be surprised to learn I disagree.

This is what I said to Craig (by email) yesterday...

"Hi Craig,

I saw your blog - Demise of the Flash startups - and might comment / post about it. Liked the middle but disagree about the conclusion.

I would agree - if the pace of disruptive change in enterprise SSD architecture had slowed down and if it already did solve most problems.

"But with a lot of very big changes in utilization still to come - the potential market size for genuinely innovative enterprise SSD startups (drives, systems and software) is bigger than it was before.

"So there will more startup companies to acquire, license from and compete with. No one's got a whole stable solution architecture and credible roadmap yet. At best current flash systems are stepping stones to somewhere else."

Oh - and if you're wondering - which is the part of Craig's blog I liked the most (apart from the cleverly provocative title) it was where he says "...those SSDs aren't as expensive as they used to be." ...read Craig's article

"A new generation of enterprise SSD rackmounts is breaking all the rules which previously constrained price, performance and reliability."

exciting new directions in rackmount SSDs

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