Fancy winning a million quid from NetApp?
Only new customers with virtualised environments need apply
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
One lucky new customer could get a million quid's worth of NetApp gear, if they reduce their storage usage by half in a virtualised environment using NetApp kit.
This is the UK version of a marketing initiative announced in the US at VMworld last week. Both follow on from a NetApp storage usage guarantee programme.
The winning customer has to be a new NetApp UK customer and the storage has to be implemented into a VMware, Citrix or Microsoft virtual environment. As part of the £1 million challenge, a NetApp-appointed analyst will independently benchmark, measure and publish the results. There's more information here.
NetApp didn't use to do this sort of thing. It had Innovations Awards for its customers' use of its kit, but these were relatively low key celebrations. Its marketing stance, compared to the more energetic marketing of EMC, was more one of long-suffering and stoical disdain.
This quiet, almost high-minded marketing approach has now changed. The company got itself a new logo and then, in a significant shift in its stance, it sidestepped EMC's refusal to benchmark its storage systems by benchmarking an EMC Clariion array itself. Of course, it saw its own FAS systems score higher than the Clariion on the same benchmark. What a neat trick.
This was thought to be a one-off, but if anything, NetApp's competitive marketing strategies have become even more aggressive. Signs of these changes include Brian Pawlowski becoming chief technical officer in August, Val Bercovici working and blogging energetically, aggressively even, in the competitive arena and joining the office of the CTO. Jay Kidd has become the chief marketing officer. Eric Brown, the quietly-spoken, discreet and reserved VP for corporate relations, left to join Carol Bartz at Yahoo!. And, of course, Tom Georgens has become CEO. NetApp has become louder.
In rapid succession we have had a 50 per cent storage saving guarantee, the extension of that to virtual environments, the addition of a 35 per cent savings guarantee if a NetApp V-Series head was put in front of competitor's storage, and now these million dollar guarantee challenges.
If million dollar and million pound challenges get it the paper and online column inches it wants then NetApp will reckon that's money well spent.
Huh! The Register doesn't want anything to do with such cheap tactics. Er, hang on, we're writing about it now. Oh no....! ®
COMMENTS
Surely some mistake - EVA poor utilisation ?
Agree with the Ntapp comments but EVA configured correctly with vraid, sparing and occupancy reserve provides north of 70% utilisation. Having worked on much of the other Tier 1 kit, utlization's good on paper but goes pear shaped in practice. It's the lack of abstraction that kills the utilization on the more traditional kit and it just gets worse over time.
Here's how you save 50% of your storage...
as NetApp cannot scale beyond 50% utilization before performance degradation due to the limits of WAFL, the quickest way to save 50% of your storage is to choose a platform that allows you to use 100% of your storage capacity with no degradation on performance.
Choose whatever you want: EMC Clariion, Equallogic, 3PAR, Compellent, HDS, (not HP EVA - also poor), or several others - they all have better usable figures than NetApp, even with their smoke and mirrors inline dedup.
As cunning as a bag full of foxes with a degree in cunning ...
So ... potential customers have to send in a detailed summary of their environment and requirement and then NetApp chooses one lucky customer to whom they will supply UP TO £1M list of equipment. Quite a cunning way of NetApp finding out the names and existing estates of a huge number of potential opportunities. Especially given that they will then pick just one customer that they think matches the extensive criteria associated with their existing guarantee the best and supply them with NetApp kit. They really are getting desperate in their search for that illusive customer that can tick the exhaustive list of boxes necessary to see a saving by using NetApp equipment. And we all know they will pick some customer who needs a tiny little filer as the lucky winner or a customer who is wall to wall competitive equipment but use the competition as a way of getting round Fair Market Value.
Simple facts are no customers I've ever met can satisfy the criteria they lay out in order to be eligible for the guarantee. And if they manage to find one through this hunt, will it be you? I doubt it!! But it's certainly an attention grabber.
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