The slowest death ever?
Netapp are still making money as far as my limited understanding of their figures goes. How long will their death take? 10 years? At least by then we'll know if Nutanix or EVO-Rail have gained any traction or if they are still too busy making pointless blog posts about how shit each other is!
Netapp's original strength was smart software in OnTap, lets face it 8 years ago it was good, very good. By todays standards its lacking. Who knows what they've got in development but one of their issues recently was how long it took them to respond with cluster mode and how poor it was when it arrived.
The other issue is how they treat their partners. I'll be honest I've not installed a Netapp for a couple of years. Tends to be EMC or Nimble these days. Not because Netapp are doomed, simply because they've been a pain in the ass to deal with, deal reg's are going to larger partners and they simply don't seen keen to engage. EMC and Nimble are both keen to engage and are passing leads over all the time.
Due to their size and market I suspect they'll survive this blip, as long as they can innovate again. They might be doing it now, as far as I know they won't be publishing what they are working on right now. People have been predicting the death of traditional storage for years, yet I'm still installing them at the same rate I always have.
You have reminded me I need to stick my community edition of Nutanix on a couple of UCS blades and see it in action! Oh and I need to play with VMware Vsan and an EVO-Rail.