NetApp is beat regularly for being too slow to new markets. Compellent was beating them in deals every day with Automated Storage Tiering (AST) and NetApp didn't respond (Compellent was acquired by Dell). If SSDs hadn't come along, Compellent would still be eating their lunch.
Then Nimble started beating them in deals every day with cheap SSD. NetApp only offered big monolithic PCI-E flash cards with a huge markup / licensing cost, while Nimble let you leverage "cheap" SSDs in a direct and scalable way. Nimble would give you a SAN with SSDs for $20k, where NetApp couldn't include their PAM flash card in any array under $40-50k. $20k of disk and SSD beats $20k of just disk most places. The new tech (SSDs) took NetApp several years to leverage. Even though NetApp's tooling, software, and capabilities were light years ahead, people could "make do" with Nimble and cheap SSDs. NetApp has only recently added reasonably priced SSDs to the mix.
NetApp regularly billed itself to partners as a "software company" who differentiated itself with software. They still have some of the most robust software in the business for encryption, replication, compliance, and orchestration. Their suite blows Nimble out of the water. But more and more, people are OK with running cheap, dumb, fast SANs and leveraging software on the other side (Windows, OpenStack, VMware) to handle storage intelligence.
As a hardware company, they're too slow and charging huge margins for consumer-available parts won't work forever. As a software company, their rivals in the non-storage world are quickly preparing to make them obsolete with server-side storage intelligence. Tough place to be, outside of enterprises who need your software stack (custom replication / cloning, retention, etc).
NetApp is beat regularly for being too slow to new markets. Compellent was beating them in deals every day with Automated Storage Tiering (AST) and NetApp didn't respond (Compellent was acquired by Dell). If SSDs hadn't come along, Compellent would still be eating their lunch.
Then Nimble started beating them in deals every day with cheap SSD. NetApp only offered big monolithic PCI-E flash cards with a huge markup / licensing cost, while Nimble let you leverage "cheap" SSDs in a direct and scalable way. Nimble would give you a SAN with SSDs for $20k, where NetApp couldn't include their PAM flash card in any array under $40-50k. $20k of disk and SSD beats $20k of just disk most places. The new tech (SSDs) took NetApp several years to leverage. Even though NetApp's tooling, software, and capabilities were light years ahead, people could "make do" with Nimble and cheap SSDs. NetApp has only recently added reasonably priced SSDs to the mix.
NetApp regularly billed itself to partners as a "software company" who differentiated itself with software. They still have some of the most robust software in the business for encryption, replication, compliance, and orchestration. Their suite blows Nimble out of the water. But more and more, people are OK with running cheap, dumb, fast SANs and leveraging software on the other side (Windows, OpenStack, VMware) to handle storage intelligence.
As a hardware company, they're too slow and charging huge margins for consumer-available parts won't work forever. As a software company, their rivals in the non-storage world are quickly preparing to make them obsolete with server-side storage intelligence. Tough place to be, outside of enterprises who need your software stack (custom replication / cloning, retention, etc).