back to article It's a Wright off: NetApp confirms SolidFire boss on hiatus, 'will be back' working on other stuff

NetApp says its SolidFire chief Dave Wright is on hiatus – and his role upon his return will not involve running the storage organization he founded. Exactly what he'll be doing when he gets back will be decided by NetApp's CEO George Kurian and cofounder Dave Hitz. Following our story earlier today on Wright taking a break, …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lets Get serious now

    NetApp's trying to smoothly transition Mr Wright out of the company in such a way so that the exodus of Solidfire employees is contained.

    What I find interesting is that Mr Wright and Mr Bercovici both departed at a critical juncture given the HCI product development. One can't help but wonder who has been leading this effort.

  2. Homer Simpson 1

    SolidFire's Time has passed

    The SolidFire architecture, although brilliantly conceived and marketed by Wright et al, never quite lived up to expectations and competitive pressure.

    Although it is, obviously, an all-flash array, there is a little too much to do for the Element software to distribute and collected copies of the data on multiple nodes over a 10Gb network to provide the kind of performance that Pure and others can deliver on all-flash appliances. As a person on the front lines for SolidFire, one of the most successful people ever selling this product, we found very little technical attraction other than the use of a REST api and the ability to deploy/undeploy and redeploy nodes in a service provider environment. In performance bake-offs, we routinely LOST business to Pure and XTremeIO. At the time I left SolidFire, a single LUN was limited to 20,000, 4k IOPs before the "QOS" features were defeated and the highly touted deterministic IO delivery model was defeated.

    But Dave Wright is a good guy and team builder. His wealth and success reflects that. But, with the ability of the latest storage technologies to far outstrip disk interface limitations, the "all flash SAN" is becoming another temporal milestone in the history of performance computing and is rapidly being replaced by hyperconverged infrastructure where the storage access path is evolving to look more like memory IO and less like external device IO. Witness the success of Nutanix and the recent products announcements from Pure where there IS NO SAN!

  3. Val Bercovici

    FYI - While I had great input and influence into the MRD and PRD for this upcoming product, it has been in the very capable hands of the dedicated engineering & product management plus GTM teams from Boulder for quite some time now. In fact, I felt it was a great time to move on precisely because the project is in such good shape.

    I'm really looking forward to seeing it ship but also working with everyone else in the hypercompetitive HCI space to help them better serve their customers via faster and better support resolution via Peritus.ai

    -Val.

  4. Val Bercovici

    NetApp HCI

    FYI - While I had great input and influence into the MRD and PRD for this upcoming product, it has been in the very capable hands of the dedicated engineering & product management plus GTM teams from Boulder for quite some time now. In fact, I felt it was a great time to move on precisely because the project is in such good shape.

    I'm really looking forward to seeing it ship but also working with everyone else in the hypercompetitive HCI space to help them better serve their customers via faster and more satisfying support resolution thru Peritus.ai

    -Val.

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