Following up on yesterday’s post, I found this blog post from Nick Triantos at NetApp, which provides good insight into NetApp’s view of the strategic fit.  I remember a meeting back in October of last year, in which I spoke with a very happy Onaro customer.  The big problem that Onaro solved for this customer was change-control management.  Basically the environment at this account is so complex and so interwoven that one change in one infrastructure component could affect huge numbers of other systems.  The implications go far beyond the particular application that any server, network or storage component serves.  In big environments, change-control management is top of mind. 

By the way, this customer is also a customer of NetApp, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, 3Par, and every major systems supplier on the market today.  So the question remains, “How is NetApp’s business model going to evolve?”   As long as NetApp evolves towards supporting an independent software business unit, then the concern over  support issues expressed by this anonymous customer should be easily addressed.  As the customer with whom I spoke said, “If it’s only going to be NetApp on NetApp, it’s useless.  I don’t want another ECC.”  That’s EMC Control Center, for those not familiar with the acronym.  For the record, EMC lists ECC as “multi-vendor,” so at least it’s positioned as providing heterogeneous support.

On another note, this customer expressed frustration over Gartner’s continued misclassification of Onaro as a storage resource management (SRM) company.  In his words, “It does configuration management and change control, not SRM.”  He uses IBM’s TPC for SRM, which is a very high-end SRM suite designed for the most complex environments.