Techno Musings

I’m sure that everyone knows the adage: use the right tool for the right job.  This means you really should not try to drive a screw in with a hammer, but instead use a screw driver.  Being a guy and all, when I was a kid I have to admit, and I’m sure that my dad would frown and all that stuff, I had to nail in a screw to see what would happen.  Well, I can say this, it was all fine and dandy when I drove the screw in, but when you try to get the thing out again, not only have you lost a screw, but a screw driver too.

Hopefully by this point I’ve piqued your interest and you are thinking: okay Michael what’s your point.  The point that I’m trying to drive to is debunking the criticism about why Hitachi has discrete products in a variety of areas.  Okay, let me go back to a part of the first sentence: use the right tool for the right job.  I think that some of our very worthy adversaries get this point like EMC and IBM.  They have discrete tools that solve specific problems, and if you look at IBM they even have many different file systems, some in their OEM products via NetApp, one called GPFS, another called JFS, etc.  Each different tool solves a different problem for IBM.  With EMC again they have different products for different areas, for high scale enterprise class workloads they have the DMX/Symmetrix and of course for other markets they have the Clariion.  Hitachi has a similar product segmentation with our enterprise class rockstar, USP-V(M), our highly reliable modular, AMS, the USP-V-like High Performance NAS platform, ultra-scale active archive, Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP), etc.  You see, early on we recognized that to optimally solve problems different tools are required.  Hitachi’s sales force has long dealt with that approach, we just don’t talk about it.  After all like all of the other storage vendors, we’ve offered two major block storage architectures and have ingrained in our corporate culture how to attack the market with these two products.  We are doing a similar thing with our file storage platforms now with HNAS, HCAP, and our NAS-Blades, different tools for different jobs.  Early on we recognized that if you really needed to store data for long periods of time, a simple file system was insufficient you must have a different product so we went and purchased Archivas last year.  For highly performant NAS there are a whole set of reasons why we work with the company that we have an equity stake in, BlueArc, to resolve really high scale file I/O types of problems.  You see we recognized that if one wanted to consolidate many NetApp filers onto one platform, the traditional bus architecture would simply not do, a different tool was required.
Okay, hopefully you are following my logic different tools and different products are required to solve different problems.  Also I hope that you are getting that I’ve mentioned IBM, EMC, and Hitachi as recognizing this to be the case.  While mentioned, I’ve not stated that NetApp yet understands this.  They are acting like their hammer, OnTap, can nail anything in, screws, nails, thumb tacks, bolts, hooks, etc.  NetApp’s name for this approach is “Unified Storage”.  And they literally are putting everything into their hammer, storage optimization, snapshots, block storage, clustered global namespace (Spinnaker ain’t no global file system, it is a clustered global namespace.), replication, FC-block storage, iSCSI-block storage.   Wait a minute those last two items in most other companies that offer storage products represent at least a different product altogether.  A widely known secret is that NetApp added iSCSI to their filers because Microsoft removed support for running Exchange and SQL server on CIFS shares, and almost as an afterthought, Fibre Channel was added allowing NetApp to dip their toes into the block storage market.  To me this confirms NetApp consistently targets their hammer, OnTap, at any market even remotely within their aim.

So, I’ll end with, do you want to buy a storage device from a vendor who wants to nail in your screws, or a vendor that uses the right tool in the right market?