NetApp Firms Up SAN Plans
NAS vendor Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP - message board), which has spent the past few years disparaging Fibre Channel as a complex and costly technology, is getting closer to delivering its own FC-based SAN system.
byteandswitch.com
Later this year, NetApp is slated to roll out a dual-personality box that will provide both NAS as well as block-level Fibre Channel access. So far, the company has disclosed only limited details on the new system, and NetApp turned down our requests for more information.
But analysts who have been briefed on the FC-enabled box tell Byte and Switch it is currently in "late beta testing" and is expected to start shipping in the fourth quarter of 2002.
NetApp plans to position its SAN-enabled box between EMC Corp.'s (NYSE: EMC - message board) Clariion and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)'s Lightning storage arrays in terms of price, performance, and features, analysts say. It will be optimized for a handful of performance-intensive applications, such as Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and databases from Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL - message board) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM - message board).
Can NetApp get a toehold in SANs despite its complete lack of experience delivering a product in this highly competitive space?
The decision to support Fibre Channel and block-level storage was "an internal struggle" among NetApp's executives, according to John Roy, an analyst with Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. But, he says, the demand among NetApp's customers for such a product was strong enough to tip the balance in favor of bringing a SAN product to market.
Roy, who expects NetApp to announce the product in late summer or early fall, believes the block-level Fibre Channel storage system has great potential as a sizeable new revenue stream for the company. NetApp has suffered along with the rest of the industry as IT spending has stalled (see NetApp Bounces on the Bottom).
"This gets them into the SAN market, which is three times as big as the NAS market," Roy says. "It's going to open new doors for them that were closed before." He adds that NetApp is running a longer-than-usual beta cycle in order to have solid reference customers when the SAN box is launched (though he doesn't know which companies are testing it out).
Not everyone's sold on this story. Bear Stearns & Co. Inc., in a research note distributed to investors earlier this month, said: "While we do see a broad scope for incremental growth from these products -- particularly from the combined NAS and SAN offering -- we would like to see how NetApp will differentiate itself against EMC or Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ - message board) in selling block-access devices, as they have been shipping for quite a long time."
What's more, for some NetApp customers, Fibre Channel SANs have absolutely zero appeal. [Ed. note: It's almost like asking a Brazilian whether he plans to cheer for the German soccer team!]
Dan Rosman, director of information technology at Jelly Belly Candy Company, says NetApp's block-level system simply doesn't interest him. "We are using our filers pretty much as originally deployed with no issue and are not really looking to enhance performance in any way at this time," he says. Jelly Belly, based in Fairfield, Calif., runs a clustered pair of NetApp F740 filers that support several Oracle databases.
NetApp obviously has a marketing challenge ahead of it, says Brad Nisbet, an IDC analyst. But he says the company is up to the task.
"For a long time, NetApp was the NAS company, and they were the first ones to come out saying NAS and Ethernet are the way to go," Nisbet says. "As they come out with Fibre Channel products they'll need to shift gears... But quite frankly, I don't think they'll have a problem doing that. They're strong in both technology and marketing."
Most likely, NetApp will deliver SAN support as an option for one of its existing NAS filers, analysts say. "My best guess is that they will sell an F880 with a SAN module," says Harry Blount, an analyst at Lehman Brothers. The company has essentially developed a block-level interface for NetApp's Data ONTAP OS and WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) file system, according to Merrill's Roy.
In addition, analysts speculate that NetApp will bundle Fibre Channel adapters from Emulex Corp. (Nasdaq: ELX - message board) as part of the SAN option. (Emulex declined to comment.) NetApp offers Emulex's Gigabit Ethernet adapters as part of its DAFS (Direct Access File System) database accelerator, which provides much better transactional performance than traditional NAS (see NetApp Preps DAFS Splash and NetApp Touts Fast DAFS Stats).
NetApp, meanwhile, has been holding its cards close to the vest. Andy Watson, VP for strategic technology, outlined the company's SAN plans in broad strokes in an interview with Byte and Switch earlier this year. "We've taken a bit longer to engineer this so that the system will support both block and file access simultaneously," Watson said in the January interview. "It will support CIFS [Common Internet File System] and NFS [Network File System] on the file side and Fibre Channel/SCSI for block-based storage."
Now, the question is: How many customers will be willing to go in for NetApp's first crack at SANs?
— Todd Spangler, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch
byteandswitch.com |
