Yawn.
The reason you keep on clinging to this specious argument is because you can't accept the fact that NTAP has lost major market share each of the last two years.
The reason why you have a hard time accepting NTAP's persistent loss of market share is because you totally bought into the false SAN vs NAS debate that a NAS-only vendor like NTAP was heavily promoting a few years ago when the SAN and NAS markets were approximately the same size. Cheaper and simpler NAS were supposed to take over the world at the expense of more expensive and complex SANs, remember?
It doesn't help that you don't have a clue of the strenghts and limitations of the log-structured file system (WAFL) that underpins NTAP's strategy. The operative word is limitations because that would have clued you into the fact that one size does not fit all in enterprise storage. That alone would have made you leery of the one-size-fits-all arguments made by a NAS-only vendor like NTAP. It's just too bad that it now appears that not only were you hapless against this particular stock promotion, you fell in hopelessly in love with somebody's cheap concept of disruption.
As a result you keep on going in circles around the indisputable empirical evidence that the SAN market is now more than 3x the size of the NAS market, a fact that may blow your mind.
The fact that Gartner finally created a new category (NAS Gateway) for Celerra nearly 7 years after it was first introduced should tell you something about the ongoing convergence of SAN and NAS. The fact that EMC continues to gain market share in storage software while NTAP continues to lose market share should be another clue.
For some reason, however, you keep on insisting that the NAS market should be judged entirely on the basis of NTAP's implementation of NAS despite the fact that Sun invented NAS more than 15 years ago and NTAP itself successfully diverged from Sun's implementation of NAS (using a general purpose Unix server as a dedicated file server) with its thin server approach optimized for file serving. Pencil in EMC's use of a true cluster approach to file serving over a storage network as another evolutionary change in the NAS market.
Not surprisingly, you tend to ignore such telling facts as the following:
1) In 2001, EMC surpassed NTAP in terms of revenue. This was inevitable.
2) In 2001, Microsoft's Window SAK (server appliance kit) captured 25% of all NAS industry shipments less than 2 years after Microsoft started focusing on this market.
Remember, the Wintel platform dominates the low-end server market and a low-end to mid-range NAS typically consolidates low-end NT servers. Microsoft's SAK strategy is designed to make sure that even if it loses OS licensing revenue due to the server consolidation facilitated by NAS, it still makes money on the SAK licenses sold by the likes of Dell, IBM, and HewPaq.
3) In 2001, Quantum led all NAS vendors in terms of unit shipments followed by Maxtor, Dell and NTAP. Quantum has decided to shift its NAS offerings to Linux.
Instead of trying to figure out how NTAP's asset-light business strategy is getting squeezed from above by EMC, from the middle by Dell/Microsoft SAK (and Dell/EMC) and from below by Quantum (Linux) and Maxtor (SAK), you fixate on this double-counting, which somehow offends your rigid and almost anal sense of categories. Somehow it almost seems like casting this cloud on EMC's lead allows you to continue with your precious fantasy, whatever it is.
To understand how silly you sound parroting the SAN vs NAS arguments that even NTAP has since abandoned, consider that SAN was pioneered by IBM for the mainframe ESCON market in the early 90s while NAS was pioneered by Sun for the networking market in the mid-80s.
Wake up and grow up! Fact simple is that SAN and NAS started converging when Celerra was introduced in 1996.
It's now 2002. What a pity it would be if the new year comes along and you are still making the argument that a NAS-only vendor like NTAP is better positioned to consolidate SAN and NAS than a vendor like EMC which is the only vendor with more than 5% market share of the SAN market and 5% market share of the NAS market or an overall NIS market share of 39%.
That, my friend, can be called desperation. |
