Categories
General

NetApp and Engenio – Part 2 – A Hypothesis

In my previous post, I discussed why I thought that NetApp’s acquisition of Engenio was a difficult one and why I question the value of the combined entity.  Simply put, there seems to be redundancy in the product line and it makes you wonder how a merged company creates substantial new value.  However, there is another angle that could help explain the move and can be simply explained in three letters – IBM.

NetApp has an existing relationship with IBM where IBM OEMs NetApp filers for their “N-Series” product line.  These products are virtually the same as what you can buy from NetApp directly.  However, the big difference is that they can be sold, quoted and supported by IBM.  IBM does have their own higher end NAS products called SONAS, but the N-series is still an important part of the IBM portfolio.  Clearly this relationship is an important one for both companies.

Categories
General

NetApp and Engenio – A curious acquisition

It was with some surprise that I saw the announcement that NetApp was acquiring Engenio this afternoon.  There was a long ensuing discussion on Twitter on this topic and I have serious doubts about the added value of the combined entity.  Here is why.

LSI’s primary go-to-market model has always been through OEMs and so they needed to have solutions that were feature rich enough to create a compelling value.  Obviously, their disk arrays have the basic table stakes such as replication and snapshots, but Engenio was trying to do more.  They wanted to create a modular array that could be extended with advanced software functionality to provide a unified storage platform.  They acquired StoreAge with a goal of bringing storage virtualization into their controller and later OnStor to embed NAS functionality.  Thus the end goal was clear – create an advanced RAID controller that could compete with the industry leaders and leverage their OEMs to go to market.  Interestingly, this model is more similar to NetApp’s strategy then you might think.

Categories
Backup General

Perspectives on Quest Acquiring BakBone

About four months ago, I published a blog post discussing the future of dedicated VMware backup solutions.  The post ignited a bigger discussion and included additional blog entries from W. Curtis Preston, me, Jon Toigo, Virtual Tacit, Veeam and Quest software.  I strongly encourage readers to review the differing perspectives in each post.

I mention all of the above to provide context to Quest’s acquisition of BakBone.  For those who are unfamiliar, BakBone is a backup software provider that plays in the low end of the market.  They position their product, NetVault, as a full service backup application that includes traditional backup, CDP and deduplication.  They have had limited success in the US and Japan appears to be their strongest market.  Their technology was spun-off from AT&T labs.  (As an aside, CommVault was also a spin-off from AT&T Labs.  Those lab guys must have been doing some amazing backup stuff!)

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General

A New Chapter

SEPATON has been a great place to work over the last six plus years.  It has been amazing watching the company grow from a small group of about 30 employees in a tiny office space to today’s environment with over 150 employees and large office and lab space.  (Ironically, our current space that once felt so expansive is beginning to feel tight!)  At the same time, the company has grown from only a few small installations to thousands worldwide and hundreds of petabytes protected.  It is truly an amazing story and I have been fortunate to play a small part in it.

SEPATON’s future continues to look bright with lots of cool new features under development.  I would love to tell you about them, but, well, I can’t and you will have to wait and see! 

The big news is that I will be starting next week at HP here in Massachusetts and helping them market their D2D, VLS and physical tape products.  It is an exciting job with great future potential and the partnership between HP and SEPATON on the VLS means that I will continue to collaborate with the SEPATON team.

Categories
General Marketing

Social media, corporate strategy & Dilbert

I have been intrigued by the recent Dilbert comic strips highlighting social media.  The piece below was particularly amusing and got me thinking about social media and corporate strategy.  The comic shows the conflict  between social media adoption and corporate culture and portrays a situation that happens all too frequently.  Many companies desire to engage in social media, but when they recognize the commitment and ensuing open discussions back away.

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General

HP acquires 3Par: Now what?

Last week, I blogged about the 3Par bidding war and how I thought that HP would prevail.  Yesterday, Dell refused to match HP’s latest offer and so unless something crazy happens, HP is now the proud owner of 3Par for the rock bottom price of $2.4B!  The price is more than double Dell’s initial bid of $1.15B and is more than EMC paid for Data Domain.  In order to justify these high bids, Dell and HP must have thought that 3Par could create strong business value.  Now that HP has prevailed and is on the hook for $2.4B, they must execute the transaction and show how 3Par can drive incremental revenue and profits.  Let’s look at some ways HP could leverage 3Par to meet these goals.

Revenue growth is a key metric that will be used to assess the success (or lack thereof) of the 3Par acquisition.  In order to accelerate top line growth, HP cannot just replace EVA and XP sales with 3Par; they must find new avenues for the technology.  Some options include:

Categories
General

Why HP will prevail over Dell in the 3Par bidding war

The Twittersphere and storage industry are abuzz with the ongoing bidding for 3Par.  HP and Dell are aggressively pursuing the company and have a vested interest in 3Par technology. I believe that HP is more motivated to acquire 3Par and will prevail.

Both Dell and HP believe that a 3Par acquisition will generate additional business value, and they both must realize that the losing party will be placed in a difficult situation.  I believe that HP has more to gain by acquiring 3Par and more to lose by failing to do so.  Here is my assessment of the gains and losses by each bidder:

Categories
Backup General

The challenge of data growth

One of the biggest challenges with data protection is managing growth.  Some of the common factors that drive increasing capacity requirements include:

  • Intrinsic growth – Growth inherent in the environment as users create new data.
  • New applications – Companies implement new applications to meet changing business requirements.  These solutions could replace existing technologies or could be net new additions.  Either way, they often generate more data to protect and retain.
  • New data types – In today’s multimedia-centric world, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of audio, video and image files being created and protected. These files are much larger and more difficult to compress than traditional content.
  • Merger & Acquisition – As M&A activities occur, the acquiring entity must expand their IT infrastructure to absorb the acquired systems and processes.

Categories
General Marketing

Tuesday Humor


Click for larger view – Comic courtesy of xkcd.com

Via Beth Pariseau from TechTarget.

Categories
General

Pondering Fibre Channel over Ethernet

Currently the twittersphere and blogosphere is actively discussing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).  The conversation was triggered by a post by Hu Yoshida from HDS, and I wanted to share my thoughts.

One of the most interesting responses was this one by Nigel Poulton where he explains the infrastructure required for FCoE.  He goes into great detail highlighting the lossless nature of FCoE and the required hardware and cabling.  The key takeaway is that FCoE is not iSCSI; it does not use generic 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE) hardware.  You will need different cabling and advanced switches to meet the more stringent demands of FCoE.