Fancy winning a million quid from NetApp? 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 …
...'cos I don't get it.
NetApp 'guarantees' that you'll get 50% storage savings, and if you actually *do* achieve that, then they'll give you £1M worth of gear?
Right....
Has their marketing dept. realised that ridiculous offers like this just make them look like a dodgy spam merchant?
"Huh! The Register doesn't want anything to do with such cheap tactics. Er, hang on, we're writing about it now. Oh no....! "
And the chance of the Register being credited with one million smackers for Remote Hosting of an Alien Net Application isn't Attractive? Oh Please, you cannot be Serious and would have to be QuITe Mad and/or Backwards in Coming Forwards to Miss Opportunity so Brazen. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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