NetApp takes the GigaOm Radar “TRIPLE CROWN”

Every day, leadership in IT departments around the globe are put in positions to make strategic technology decisions that will move their business forward and allow them to do more with less, all while operating under tighter security and cost management constraints.  So it begs the question… HOW?!  How do you make those decisions?

You can’t possibly know everything about everything, be on top of every new piece of technology across the entire spectrum, and how each of them will interop with your environment and help you reach your business goals.  You need vendors, partners, trusted advisors, communities, and the work of objective analysts whose job it IS to know and evaluate all of these things, all in order to help you evaluate the available solutions out there, and narrow down your choices to those that will actually be beneficial to you.

Recently, it was announced that NetApp achieved a pretty big milestone that I am really REALLY proud of us accomplishing, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about today.  But the real reason I’m making a standalone video is because of the real impact it can have on a customers’ decision-making process that I think everyone needs to understand.

The GigaOm Radar

In order to drive that home, you first need to understand what is unique about the GigaOm Radar, and why it is such a big deal that NetApp achieved top ranking in “the big three” categories. Shout out to Enrico and Max for their fantastic work in establishing this modern guidance system for customers.  It truly takes the best parts into account.  In February of 2020, GigaOm launched The Radar, throwing out a lot of the old ways of thinking.  Arbitrary things like market share percentages and revenue numbers gathered by researchers are left on the cutting room floor, not even considered in the evaluation and further recommendation of any product or solution.  They might reflect a particular vendor’s success in the market in the past, but doesn’t necessarily imply how useful a product or solution might be to you going forward.  This is one of the biggest differentiators I personally see in how the Radar evaluates and positions vendors and products as opposed to that old way of using quadrants.  In addition, it gives additional indicators like the arrows that illustrate speed and heading direction for a particular solution being evaluated.  This gives you a 12-18 month view in how they predict things to shake out, rather than look at past success to guide modern, forward-thinking ways of doing things.

OK now that you’ve got an understanding of what makes Radar unique, let’s talk about the recent findings in the report titled: “Data Storage for the Hybrid Multi-Cloud Era”  I’ll leave a link to the full report in the description below, as it goes extremely in-depth and you’ll want to read it if you’re evaluating any of the following solutions.

Storage & Hybrid Multi-cloud

As noted in the report, ten years ago, there was a focus on shared storage as a vehicle to support hybrid workloads, mostly around virtualization. I personally lived through that era running a datacenter and can attest that support for NFS, SMB, and block storage in a single platform was THE sole reason I chose NetApp when I was a customer over all of the competitors.  But today, the requirements have shifted. There needs to be further unification across on-prem and cloud, devops and infrastructure, each with their own unique environments, creating a layered platform for admins and users alike to access, manage, and protect data regardless of the location.  In order to facilitate that in the best way possible, the platform needs to be a single unified space that share control facilities regardless of location.  In this world, ONTAP continues to be the gift that keeps on givin!  Ya see, twenty years ago, NetApp led the industry by introducing unified block and file storage. Over the last ten years, we’ve adopted an “ONTAP Everywhere” mantra and led the charge of overhauling our business into one that naturally benefits customers pursuing a hybrid model across clouds and on-prem.  As stated correctly in the GigaOm report, we have been building our portfolio with a next-generation hybrid multi-cloud unified storage approach.  And the beauty of this approach is that at the foundation of it all is ONTAP.  Our rock-solid #1 storage operating system that continues to show its true power day after day, year after year.

So let’s take a look at the three Radars and how they stack up.

Cloud File Storage

Last September, GigaOm released their 2021 look at Cloud File Storage praising NetApp’s leadership position with outstanding execution of a coherent multi-cloud strategy.  Personally, I’ve only got one thing to say.  #NAS4LIFE, and if you know you know.  If you don’t, it’s one of my old calling cards.  File storage is more important now than it ever has been as companies race to the cloud.  It will provide the path of least resistance and still deliver the performance and reliability requirements necessary to run the biggest workloads.  Coupled with NFS 4.1 and SMB 3 support, there’s literally nothing you can’t do at this point.  And cmon…let’s be serious with one another for a moment.  You’re sick and tired of managing those LUNs and queue depths, aren’t you?  Come towards the light.  It’s safe and a lot of fun over here, I promise.

Scale-out File Systems

Next up, we’ve got the Radar for Enterprise Scale-Out File Systems where NetApp took the top position again. I mean, it’s ONTAP. You’re just simply not going to touch ONTAP, and we continue to innovate driving new features into the platform to strengthen and secure it.  If there’s a mic-drop moment, it came recently as the NSA announced that ONTAP was the first-ever filesystem to receive their validation for encryption and security.  I don’t really know what more needs to be said.  Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty to say, but let’s save that for a full ONTAP video I’ve got in the queue for you guys coming soon.

Primary Storage for Large Enterprises

Lastly, we’ve got the 2021 Radar covering Primary Storage for Large Enterprises.  At the end of the day, this is NetApp’s bread and butter.  Companies choose NetApp not only for ONTAP, but for the rich suite of software that surrounds and enables it to interact with all major tier-1 apps.  Just a few short years ago, they said ONTAP couldn’t run an all-flash system.  And we were happy to prove them wrong.  In fact, it not only runs it, but it runs circles around the competition, and with the advent of clustered ONTAP, we’re able to operate native tiers of storage within the same cluster. And to GigaOm’s point, we’re even adding QLC-based high-capacity all-flash systems to help with costs.  15 terabyte drives in a 2U 24-drive shelf gives you 300TB in a tiny 2U footprint.  Not to mention our innovation around NVMe over TCP, allowing you to take advantage of new technology on existing ethernet infrastructure.  And as soon as this becomes mainstream adopted in the cloud…. Well, you can see where this goes.

I’ve rattled on enough but you get the picture.  I wanted to send out a heartfelt congratulations to all of the teams at NetApp that have all been pivotal in us getting to this position in a relatively short period of time.  I also want to thank all of our customers that have trusted us to be their partners both on-prem and in the cloud.  If you haven’t heard of NetApp yet, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.  Make sure you’re subscribed to the channel here and check out some of the other videos here on the channel.  I’ve got a lot on the way this year.  We’re going to configure some systems, go over the backup and recovery landscape, and move some data back and forth to the cloud.  I wanna show you what these systems and software is truly capable of over the course of the year.

If you liked this video, make sure to leave a Like (it really does help!) and let me know down in the comments below if you have any questions.  You can also come and join the official NetApp discord community where we have a ton of staff, engineers, and experts ready to help and answer any questions you may have.

Thanks, and we’ll see you next time!