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KIDD: Hi, I’m Jay Kidd, the Senior Vice President of the Products and Solutions Group
at NetApp and welcome to iNside NetApp. Today I’m joined by Manish Goel, the Executive
Vice President of Products, to mark the 8th anniversary of the industry’s first Unified
Storage System. In this edition of iNside NetApp, we’re focusing on the increasingly
popular trend of unified storage, something that NetApp pioneered and really made a big
bet on in 2002. So Manish, you were here in 2002. Why did we make such a big bet on this?
Why was it so important?
GOEL: I think, Jay, it was very obvious to us that that was a customer problem that needed
to be solved by someone. Customers were building disparate architectures for their different
needs, whether it was protocols, whether it was the combination of cost and performance,
and we figured out a way of technically solving that issue.
KIDD: A lot of people are talking about unified storage lately but what do we mean when we
say “unified storage”?
GOEL: You know, from my standpoint, unification of storage is a way of thinking and a way
of building. It’s not a feature, it’s not a marketing program, it’s not a wrapper.
It’s a way of thinking at every level of the storage stack. Starts from media types,
whether it’s fiber channel drives or SATA drives and putting them together. It’s a
protocol level, CIFS, NFS, fiber channel. It’s that primary and secondary users of
data off serving data as well as replicating it and storing it for disaster recovery or
backup. It’s that manageability of making sure that a single administration interface
is presented, regardless of what the physical storage underneath that is. It’s cost efficiency
of making sure that even high performance storage as well as low cost storage all get
the benefit of all the cost and storage efficiency. So it’s a program at every level of how
we are constructing these architectures and storage systems so that it becomes a single
architecture which meets any need that the customer may have today or as it evolves.
KIDD: So it really sounds like something that you have to architect from the beginning.
It’s not a bolt-on.
GOEL: It absolutely is not. It’s the way to build the product from ground up.
KIDD: Yeah. So where are we taking it? What’s, what’s the future for unified storage?
GOEL: I think there’s always going to be the next thing that needs to be unified, whether
it’s trends like now we’re talking a lot about flash, NSSDs. That becomes something
that we have to integrate into the unification or it is the unification of the network with
10-gig Ethernet and one-wire strategy, so making sure that the fiber channel networks
and the Ether networks are coming together, unifying that. So there are some very interesting
developments going on. But, you know, so that’s sort of the technology part of it, Jay. You
spend a lot of time in front of customers. What are you hearing from customers?
KIDD: Yeah, the unified story that NetApp’s been telling for the whole eight years, it’s,
it’s always resonated well. There was a customer just recently I was talking with,
American Greetings, and they had a problem where they had a lot of Window servers with
a set of applications, they had Linux servers, they had AIX. I think they had another flavor
of UNIX as well. And they had organically grown three different storage architectures
to meet those, those three different application workloads. They wanted to consultant to a
single pool of storage. They were moving to a number of virtual machine technologies as
well. So they needed something that could deliver the block protocol access that their
UNIX systems needed, they needed file protocol access, they needed a block on Ethernet as
well. They needed to integrate all these things together into a common pool and they wanted
to be able to manage replicas and mirrors of that data in a common way to a different
location. So NetApp had the perfect solution for them 'cause we were able to bring it all
together and in the process of unifying those three disparate architectures into a common
unified architecture, they saved a half a million dollars out of their budget. So it
was a big win for American Greetings.
GOEL: Oh, that’s huge because, you know, for a customer like that to save that kind
of money and simplify their operations is huge. So as you’re talking to the customers
or if there’s something that you want to leave the customers to be thinking about,
because all vendors are jumping on this bandwagon right now, what would you urge the customers
to think about if there’s one thing?
KIDD: Although the economy seems to be strengthening, customers are still all concerned about keeping
their operating costs in check and being very efficient in their capital usage as well.
Unification essentially take, or unified storage, it takes complexity out of the equation by
being able to use the same common platform for a broader range of application workloads,
for high performance disk and high capacity disk across any protocol with common management
so you only have to train your people once. With unified data protection so you don’t
have multiple protection architectures you’re dealing with and with the efficiency of storing
more data in less spindles that NetApp does so well, a complete package for unified storage
is what people need to be looking at to really get the full benefit with a little economic
savings that they can realize. In the near future they’ll hear a lot about, a lot of
hype and hyperbole around unified storage that are largely bolt-on approaches. The true
integrated approach to unified storage is only offered by NetApp and really we think
that, the whole package is what’s needed to deliver the full value.
GOEL: Sounds like a win for the customers.
KIDD: That’s the whole goal, isn’t it? So Manish, I’d like to thank you very much
for joining us and thank you all as well for joining us on iNside NetApp. For more information
on case studies regarding our unified storage customers, please check out NetApp.com. I’m
Jay Kidd for iNside NetApp and have a great day.
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