There is no way the assemblers DELL, CPQ, and HWP etc. will NOT want to have piece of this pie particularly en-light that their bread butter revenue generators are becoming less and less important.
They already want a piece of the storage market. (Add SUNW and IBM to your list, btw.) They will get a piece of the storage market. BUT, in the past they more or less automatically got the order for disk arrays from the customers that were buying the servers from them. Now their customers are seeing that the amount of storage that they require is much more significant in cost and cost of ownership that the storage purchase decision deserves more consideration.
That is where NTAP's speed, reliability, simplicity and scalability will win the order. Of course, EMC will also play well here.
So far, none of the box makers has fielded an innovative solution. They are still re-packaging versions of Unix or Windows with RAID 1, 3, or 5. No competition by any of those measures (speed/reliability/simplicity/scalability).
In the 100GB and below markets, the box makers will do fine, but as the scaling climbs, they will not do well.
I also see the evolution of an open system for storage to where the software that NTAP has will become less important.
Contraire. As scalability becomes more and more important, the complexity of a customer's piecing together the storage hardware, the operating software, and the backup solutions becomes expensive. It is software that gives the performance, reliability, and scalability that are required. NTAP's clustered configurations, which will provide the scalability and resilience that big storage problems require, are a combination of hardware and software. Though NTAP is using off-the-shelf hardware even in its clusetered configs, the value added by NTAP's component selection, assembly, burn in and warranty service cannot be underestimated. The off-the-shelf approach reduces costs, and allows NTAP to remain state-of-the-art on the hardware front.
As EMC has demonstrated, through a more proprietary approach to the storage solution, operating huge storage farms harkens back to the days of mainframe computing. Customers really don't want to piece this stuff together as they have with the client/server model. They want to focus on their business, so they want someone to deliver a fully functional, reliable, scalable, inexpensive storage solution and be there when it breaks.
Now that last statement could be avoided by NTAP if they were to license their software or sell it to the assemblers.
As evidenced by NTAP's attempt to nurture Dell by providing the software, motherboards, and NVRAM and Dell selling, assembling, and delivering Dell-branded product, NTAP wants to do that. Dell's sales model failed. Others could succeed.
Here is my question, do you see the day NTAP become a true software company, to were they sell software into the mid to low high end storage area where the bulk of the storage needs will be needed and PC manufacture particularly DELL shine in assembling, and focus instead on the high end as a hardware provider?
I do, GM. That is exactly what they had in mind with Dell.
OTOH, I also foresee the day when NTAP creates a version of the Dell sales model and sells low end product on the internet. The NTAP product's simplicity and the NTAP support infrastructure lend themselves to that model very nicely. Now that Dell is not a partner, NTAP could compete with them in their own territory.
But first, NTAP will continue to focus on the high end, high scale market. That's where the money is, because the folks that are buying 1TB configs now will be buying 10TB configs next year, so to speak. |
