NetApp Hitz out at critics over the flashy SolidFire buyout deal

Comment NetApp co-founder Dave Hitz has blogged about the closing of the Solidfire deal and castrated any misleading bull^* about NetApp’s flash strategy.

Hitz says he admires Solidfire’s architectural design, writing: “SolidFire’s architectural choices are elegant and made for a reason. (This is the geeky paragraph, so skip on if it is too much.) Why write twice instead of using RAID? First, it eliminates the performance reduction in degraded mode. Second, it allows commodity, single-attach SSDs instead of enterprise dual-attach drives. Way cheaper. And third, it eliminates HA pairs and shared RAID shelves.”

He says: “Nodes use internal drives, and Ethernet is the only interconnect. Way cheaper again. Together, these choices allow a shared-nothing cluster built from off-the-shelf x86 servers.”

“How does SolidFire automatically balance capacity and load across the entire array? For each block written, it creates a 'secure crypto-hash' of the block’s content and uses that as a 'Block ID' to determine where the block goes. The crypto-hash also provides in-line deduplication across the entire cluster.

“In a loosely coupled cluster, it is tricky to maintain consistent reference counts for deduplication, snapshots, and clones, so SolidFire uses garbage collection instead. This allows clone creation and deletion to be instant, even in very large clusters. I love how these design choices fit together and complement each other.”

He admits there’s overlap between NetApp’s three all-flash products – All-flash FAS, EF-Series and SolidFire – but says no single all-flash array can meet every requirement. He says:

SolidFire fits nicely into our existing flash portfolio because it is so different from All Flash FAS (AFF) and the EF-Series. I think of EF as being like one of those racing cars built from aluminum tubes. It's an exaggeration to say that EF has no windshield or doors, but you get the idea: it is super-fast and optimized for price-performance. By contrast, ONTAP has broad application integration and a rich set of enterprise-class data services.

All three can run Oracle databases wonderfully. But they have very different design centres: bare-metal speed, simple cloud-like scale, and powerful data services.

Hitz expects flash to replace disk for primary data storage over time.

Yet ONTAP’s historical premise was that it could effectively meet every requirement NetApp’s customers had for a disk drive-based storage array. If Hitz now says no all-flash array design can meet every requirement then he might agree that external storage arrays in general can’t meet every storage requirement either.

By extension, NetApp could get into server-based storage, meaning hyper-converged appliances. We’ll see. ®

Bullnote

* Dave Hitz’ autobiography is called “How to Castrate a Bull.”