back to article IDC Storage Tracker: NetApp is losing market share

IDC's quarterly Storage Tracker shows NetApp losing market share in disk storage sales for the third straight quarter while EMC rises like a rocket. IDC's quarterly storage tracker measures external disk sales – networked arrays, in other words – and also total disk storage sales, which also covers server-attached disks. It …

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  1. Hoosier Storage Guy
    Alert

    Interesting it coincides with release of VNX

    I'll be the first to say that NetApp makes a good product, but they have fallen behind a bit in innovation as well as ease-of-use. EMC's Unisphere is better than System Manager, no question about it in my mind after using both (particularly VNXe's Unisphere relative to managing FAS2040 in the SMB market). The things NetApp used to hammer EMC on were finally fixed in VNX. There is truly one GUI to manage SAN and NAS, and NAS can use the same storage pool as SAN. EMC also bundled their software into solution suites as NetApp did, so it's no longer a la carte ordering.

    Now, I see NetApp folks often resort to "Well, there are still two versions of the VNX OS running under the covers". Yes, that is true. But, as long as you can manage it with one GUI and both Block and File code bases are mature and reliable, then nobody really cares. If you have to resort to that argument to try and win competitively, well you haven't innovated enough in your own product line to come up with better arguments.

    *Disclaimer, I work for an EMC and NetApp VAR.

  2. Smoking Man
    Unhappy

    Right to left, left to right

    Is it only me, getting confused by the charts which show partially time increasing from left to right, partially decreasing from left to right?

    So if you for example don't read the graph "External Disk Storage - supplier quarterly revenue market share %" carefully enough, you could get the impression, that EMC loses market share.

    Ok, I'm just a dumb engineer, no analyst. That might explain something.

  3. H.T.

    NetApp, Run away, Run away fast

    If you're thinking of purchasing NetApp save yourself a lot of time and trouble, don't. We migrated to NetApp six months ago, a pair of FAS3240s. The system has crashed twice in 6 months taking down most of our production servers.

    Worst has been the appallingly pathetic response from NetApp support. I've worked with all the major UNIX vendors over the past 15 years and NetApp support is the absolute worst. NetApp support is just plain bad. We're not talking about a single experience or a single person, NetApp support has been consistently bad.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: NetApp, Run away, Run away fast

      You could buy the IBM N-Series instead. Same FAS under the covers, IBM support.

    2. 4bitsNnibbles

      Re: NetApp, Run away, Run away fast

      I've managed large storage frames (primarily in UNIX shops) from Hitachi, Sun, EMC and NetApp over the last 10 years. I currently manage about 50 NetApp filers of all sizes for critical NAS/SAN needs. I would say NetApp boxes have been by far the most stable, alongside Sun in that regard. EMC's DMX boxes were stable, but their support was horrible (you ever get a call from a support tech in India asking to dial into your storage frame for a dial-home that was already reported and 3 days old?).

      I've had much better experiences with NetApp's support than with EMC's. Perhaps we shouldn't tell folks to run away quite yet without surveying the rest of the storage admins on here.

      As for your 3240s "crashing" and taking down most of your production servers; are you sure they have been configured correctly, and perhaps more importantly, cabled up correctly for HA? I ask because I've never seen those boxes not fail over to their partner head gracefully in case of a panic. That's what always made them nice; 2 controllers in a single chassis.

  4. Ant Evans
    Stop

    OEM?

    IDC says it does not include OEM sales, by which it presumably means it does not try to unravel them.

    Warning: competitors with significant OEM businesses will appear smaller in your rear view mirror than they really are.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: OEM?

      NetApp's big OEM business would be via the IBM N-Series (aka NetApp FAS with a better looking jet black IBM case). I don't think that would have gone up or down substantially enough to skew the numbers, unless it was included in the historical numbers but not the current numbers.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: OEM?

        Correction, and the LSI stuff after the acquisition.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    These charts are not apples to apples

    They should strip out the DAS, internal disk, OEM storage from these numbers are compare external disk systems to external disk systems. For the pure SAN and SAN like NAS market, it is EMC, IBM, HDS/NetApp (relative tie) in the order of revenues. NetApp does stand alone filers, gateways as well as full on enterprise storage, so it is difficult to say where they are relative to the Big 3, EMC, IBM and HDS.

    I think people are just tired of paying NetApp costs for file stores (I know they do block, but it is primarily filer data). The object store/Hadoop trend is going to take the air out of NetApp's balloon. EMC ditching Clarrion/Celerra for VNX is probably cutting into them too.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IDC may be wrong

    IDC is an agency based in Boston ( guess another storage company here) and will take the inputs provided by storage vendors to extrapolate useless graphs. Imagine a big vendor can always take advantage of stating the money was made here in tier 1 or 2 or 3 where ever they need to pressurize the competition. IDC does not go into the vendors books and revalidate what a vendor states. I have personally felt NetApp, EMC and IBM growing and seen Dell decline in many accounts. I may be wrong here but how sure are IDC here.

  7. dikrek

    It helps to understand where the numbers are coming from

    Hi All, Dimitris from NetApp here.

    According to IDC figures, if one looks at the Open Systems Networked Storage marketshare (where NetApp plays, please let's discount storage sold inside servers), NetApp remains #2 after EMC, even though EMC has a plethora of products that are counted yet are not general-purpose storage appliances.

    The NetApp share was 14.5% according to IDC, up from 13.3% a year ago.

    That’s not called “losing market share”.

    Ant Evans got it right. What the figures don’t show is that IDC doesn’t count the ton of NetApp OEM product resold by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Dell, and more. Instead, those sales show up as IBM, Oracle and Dell sales.

    Once that’s taken into account, the NetApp share grows to over 21%, or a very very big bump up indeed.

    “Lies, damn lies and statistics”..

    EMC is still higher at 31.9%, but the gap is narrowing…

    Oh, and according to IDC figures, NetApp is #1 in the replication software marketshare, ahead of EMC. 32.7% vs 31.4%. Close, but if one considers the relative size of the 2 companies, and how many EMC products are counted in that percentage, the NetApp figure is even more impressive.

    Thoughts?

    Thx

    D

  8. Barry Whyte
    Go

    makes sense

    Interesting... V7000 released 4Q20120, and saw a MASSIVE increase in sales in 4Q2011... with V7000 Unified... maybe its all making sens (on the IBM numbers anyway)

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    v7000

    Yeah, IBM have had quite a lot of wins with the v7000...so that would have certainly helped their $'s. Very very easy to use UI which is surprising from IBM :-)

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