Network Appliance's growing ambition

09.02.2006
It's probably a sign of the times when almost every one of the numerous new products I hear about in a week is related to data protection. Despite the volume of new solutions, there is often sharp disagreement among vendors as to the best data-protection approach.

For example, according to some vendors continuous data protection is mostly hype because the backup paradigm works just fine for the majority of their customers. Others swear that the demand for VTLs (virtual tape libraries) is only a miniscule percentage of the target devices market. I could go on with similar examples, but you get the point.

Sour grapes? Perhaps, but often those statements are just a temporary smokescreen to gain some time while the vendor is secretly working to catch up with its competitors.

As for the slew of new products, probably the most interesting novelty I can finally talk about this week is the NearStore VTL from Network Appliance. As you may remember, news of NetApp buying Alacritus and its VTL application for a handful of millions has been running since last spring.

However, nobody can blame NetApp for taking its time to come up with a new product (the NearStore VTL) based on Alacritus software, especially if you consider that the company has also been working on a major reshaping of its offering.

In fact, if I step back from the news for a second and focus on NetApp as it was, say, two years ago, I see a company held captive by its own platform of successful products most of which, alas, ran only on its proprietary hardware.