NetApp: Storage efficiency is a winning formula

In recent days, NetApp has become a "red man" in the virtualization and cloud computing market. NetApp strategic alliance with Cisco, VMware launched a virtual dynamic data center solution, launched the first shot in the cloud computing market.

12 to 14 cloud service providers, Liu Baohua: IDC's report shows that NetApp's share in the global storage market has risen to second place. In the past few years, what are the reasons for the rapid growth of NetApp? When NetApp becomes a leader from a chaser, will the company's future development orientation and strategy change?

Simon Green: In the past 12 months, the global economic environment has undergone tremendous changes. Although the storage market has also been hit by the international financial crisis, customer demand is still widespread. Due to the tightening of IT budget, customers hope to overcome the immediate difficulties by adopting some new technologies to further increase the utilization of storage and reduce costs. In the next 2 to 3 years, the global cloud computing market may have 12 to 14 large-scale telecommunications operators providing cloud services. What NetApp has to do now is to work more closely with these telecom operators to embrace this new revolution to meet the requirements of technology and application aggregation.

Specifically, on a technical level, NetApp hopes to provide these cloud service providers with better technologies so that they can provide better services. At the application level, NetApp is committed to creating a better collaborative eco-environment, strengthening cooperation with some of the world-renowned system integrators, and strong partner systems, enabling NetApp to have strong marketing and execution capabilities; NetApp will also strengthen Collaboration with technology partners such as VMware, Cisco, Citrix, and Microsoft.

When it comes to NetApp’s increased market share, on the one hand, the overall market environment changes. On the other hand, the concept of storage efficiency advocated by NetApp has a better resonance with the market and customers. More and more customers want to find some technologies that can obtain greater return on investment in existing technology architectures. By deploying NetApp storage technologies, storage efficiency can be improved, and they can better adapt to changes in the real economic environment. .

Liu Baohua: From NetApp's financial report, NAS products accounted for 48% of the company's total revenue. Can you predict the ideal revenue ratio of NetApp's product lines in the future? What kind of position will cloud storage products take, and will their revenue become the main support for company performance?

Simon Green: From the perspective of sales, the emergence of cloud storage will not bring much change to the company's existing product mix and revenue ratio. Companies like Yahoo, Telstra, British Telecom, and Tsystem have already deployed cloud computing systems and began offering external cloud services. Their cloud computing systems are built on top of NetApp's technology architecture. These users chose NetApp because NetApp storage systems are more cost-effective and efficient, and they can meet all of the user's application needs on a single system.

At present, it is difficult to say how much the emergence of cloud computing technology can bring NetApp's sales, which depends on many factors. The most important factor is how successful cloud computing can be in the future. As mentioned above, there may be 12 to 14 large-scale cloud service providers in the world in the future. NetApp's focus is to provide these cloud service providers with an optimized technology architecture. NetApp has now launched a solution for virtualized dynamic data centers. For example, we have a large global customer. Previously, 40% of its storage systems came from NetApp. Today, it has chosen to outsource IT applications to cloud service providers, and the cloud service provider finally decided to build all its applications on the NetApp platform. As a result, NetApp's products have changed from 40% share to 100% overnight. There are many similar examples.

Liu Baohua: When I visited the United States, I discovered that the development of the cloud computing market in the United States is much faster than in China. Many users in China are still doubting the feasibility of the cloud, and the United States already has many public cloud success stories. In the cloud computing market, VMware has been committed to the introduction of a unified standard. Do you think that there will be a unified standard for cloud computing in the future?

Simon Green: Objectively speaking, cloud computing hardly has a unified standard. Because the entire cloud computing technology architecture includes many contents, such as servers, storage, networks, and various applications. It is not a technology, but involves all aspects, including data backup, security, etc., so it is difficult to have a unified standard.

There are indeed some successful examples of successful cloud computing in the United States, but these are only sporadic examples. It is difficult to say that cloud computing is a very mature market based on these sporadic examples. Take Tsystem as an example. They have achieved very great success in cloud computing. In a quarter, the sales volume through cloud services reached US$1 billion. However, not all customers can reach the level of the T system. Some large telecom operators still take a wait-and-see attitude toward cloud computing. It can be seen that the maturity of technology does not mean that the entire application market is very mature. For the future development of cloud computing, it is more important to see if the business model is mature.

Liu Baohua: From the current situation, some storage vendors can not only provide cloud storage solutions, but also provide cloud-based operational services. How do you see such a new business model?

Simon Green: I still believe that in the future there will eventually be 12 to 14 large-scale cloud service providers on the global scale, and most of these cloud service providers will be telecom operators. One of the most direct reasons is that whether cloud services can scale to a large extent is closely related to network bandwidth and infrastructure, and large-scale telecommunication operators have inherent advantages in this regard. Some companies may also be able to provide certain types of special cloud services, such as e-mail services, but in the end these enterprises may be acquired by large telecom operators.

Liu Baohua: At present, there are some disputes about private and public clouds. Some people think that the private cloud within the company will develop faster in the future, and public cloud development will be relatively slow. According to your judgment, what is the future pattern of the cloud computing market and what are the prospects of the private cloud?

Simon Green: Private and public clouds will co-exist. Some large companies may build their own private clouds first. The private cloud mainly provides cloud services for different business departments and branches within the company. My personal opinion is that in the future cloud computing market, the proportion of private clouds may be 40%, while public cloud services account for 60%.

A Fortune magazine survey of CIOs showed that 80% of customers stated that they will put 60% of their IT business on external clouds in the next 18 months. From this we can see that moving to an external cloud is a general trend. One of the key factors affecting users' migration of applications to external clouds is the security of cloud services. This includes not only whether the customers themselves have confidence, but also whether they have confidence in the new business model of external cloud. In addition, the price of cloud services is also an important factor.

Liu Baohua: Do you have such concerns: After a large number of companies adopt public clouds, they will reduce the purchase of storage devices. Storage vendors are pushing for cloud computing and cloud services. Will they be hurt by cloud computing while expanding into new markets?

Simon Green: I don't think customers will reduce the need for storage after adopting a cloud computing architecture. The main reason is that regardless of whether or not a cloud computing architecture is used, the amount of data stored is the same. Whether a customer adopts a cloud computing architecture can only affect the way data is stored without affecting the creation of data.

Convergence is the trend of the times Liu Baohua: Intel is now forging ahead into the storage market, and has raised the issue of architecture convergence and standardization. It is hoped that the standard architecture of x86 servers will be extended to storage systems and servers and storage will be integrated. Will this become a trend in the future?

Simon Green: I cannot fully agree with this view. The architecture of the server may be standardized, and the disk may be standardized, but for information management, it covers far more than disk. The architecture of the CPU is standardized, and traditional server vendors can certainly provide standardized servers based on this. But for the storage system, it is not a simple disk problem, but more important is how to manage all the information on the disk, how to do backups, archiving. From this perspective, it is hard to say that a standardized architecture will appear in the storage system, but it can be made into a single architecture.

Liu Baohua: Turning to the issue of virtualization, we also noticed that NetApp is promoting a virtualization commitment project worldwide that promises users to increase storage efficiency to a higher level after using NetApp storage virtualization solutions. Why does NetApp propose such a strategy? How is the current feedback from users?

Simon Green: Our goal is very clear. We hope that through this plan, we will increase customer awareness of NetApp's concept of storage efficiency. Through such a commitment program, we will let customers know that NetApp can help customers greatly improve the utilization of existing storage systems. . A lot of practice has proved that after adopting this plan, customers find that the actual storage efficiency increase far exceeds NetApp's promised 50% goal.

You also asked why NetApp’s market share is rapidly expanding. This is closely related to the storage efficiency strategy that we strongly advocate. Through this strategy, customers can better understand that NetApp has great value in improving storage efficiency, and then believe NetApp choose NetApp.

Alliance for my use Liu Baohua: We have noticed that many storage vendors adopt alliances when promoting cloud storage and virtualization. For example, VMware, Cisco, and EMC form a strategic alliance (VCE). NetApp also cooperates with Cisco and VMware. Formed a coalition. The coincidence of the two alliances seems to be high because the other two partners are the same except for the storage part. How do you see the competitive relationship between these two alliances?

Simon Green: This question can be analyzed from two perspectives: marketing and practical effects. In fact, in the past month, many customers are asking me the same question. Whether it's a VCE alliance or a coalition of VMware, Cisco, and NetApp, the key question is whether they can deliver real products or solutions to customers and benefit them.

NetApp's strategic alliance with Cisco and VMware has delivered many practical solutions to customers. The three companies have invested heavily in engineering research and collaboration to ensure that the solutions provided by the three vendors provide customers with higher value. As far as I know, there are many cases in which customers have succeeded in using this trinity solution. What we need to improve is to continue to strengthen marketing efforts so that more customers understand what value NetApp, Cisco, and VMware can bring to them. This is an issue of execution.

Liu Baohua: Recently, NetApp announced its alliance with Fujitsu. Some people commented that the partnership between NetApp and Fujitsu seems to be closer than the partnership between NetApp and IBM. What kind of cooperation relationship between NetApp and Fujitsu?

Simon Green: So far, NetApp and Fujitsu have worked closely together in Europe and Japan. As for the impact of NetApp's cooperation with Fujitsu on NetApp's development in the United States, China, and India, it is not yet certain. One thing is certain, however, that NetApp and Fujitsu are strong partners and the partnership is very healthy. Among the storage solutions provided by Fujitsu, NetApp products account for a large proportion.

However, this does not explain why NetApp and Fujitsu and NetApp and IBM have these two kinds of cooperation relations, because this is two kinds of different cooperation modes. In the future, NetApp will strengthen its cooperation with Fujitsu in its advantageous areas, and the scope of cooperation between NetApp and IBM may be broader. However, NetApp will abide by the principle that NetApp's cooperation with Fujitsu will not be at the expense of other alliances or partnerships.

Can not lose enthusiasm Liu Baohua: NetApp has been ranked as the best employer by the United States "Fortune" magazine for seven consecutive years. In 2009, NetApp jumped to first place in Fortune magazine’s list of best employers. In the process of rapid growth of a company, employees often have to bear greater pressure, and NetApp has not only maintained high-speed growth in the past few years, but also received a high degree of recognition of employees. How does NetApp coordinate the relationship between enterprise development and employee benefits?

Simon Green: Why can't a fast-growing company be the best employer? The key to NetApp's success is that corporate management spends a lot of time communicating with employees. NetApp usually asks a new employee a question: Will you set a high goal for yourself? If this person is not willing to set a high goal for himself, then NetApp may not be ideal for him. s Choice.

Through communication with employees, we found that many employees are very proud of their efforts to achieve results, are excited about the goals set by the company, and are passionate about achieving this goal. NetApp hopes to create a platform for each employee to allow them to make the most of their activities, rather than just offering free lunches or mineral water to attract employees.

Another important aspect is how we maintain and develop the core of corporate culture, that is, integrity and integrity, and outstanding business performance. We hope that all employees will maintain their enthusiasm every day, whether it is when they wake up every morning or when they visit customers. The enthusiasm of employees can affect the customers. The customers will be willing to deal with such passionate companies and employees, which will bring us more business.

Liu Baohua: I have a friend who ranks about 400 in the Forbes list in China, but he told me that his life is not happy because his life is full of work and the pressure is so great that he gets enteritis. We know that you are not only good at all kinds of sports, but also regularly take out time each year to travel and leisure with your family. How do you balance your career and family relationships?

Simon Green: Frankly speaking, I don't think I've done a good job of balancing my career and family life. In fact, I can do better. The key point is that you must spend your time on things that you consider most important. In fact, busyness is not a difficult task. When it is difficult, it is time to stop and review the past and make a summary.