NetApp has been fairly quiet after the drama of the EMC/Data Domain acquisition died down. Quite a contrast to Quantum, who hammered the market with an incredible amount of positive PR about product enhancements and strategic positions to market.
So instead of playing it straight to the the technical crowd, NetApp is shifting focus to the hip-hop consumers of enterprise storage with a music video, a move I both admire and hope to emulate in my own job.
Arguably, NetApp has quite a bit to boast about when it comes to primary storage/NAS deduplication. they’ve built it, deployed it successfully, and are the lead-player in the market. But as players go, they certainly don’t have as much play in the secondary/backup deduplication market. Their entry to market with deduplication was late, then bid to takeover Data Domain and lost the ‘cold-hard-cash’ war with EMC. For NetApp’s sake, I do hope the best for them gaining marketshare with the little giant (Data Domain) and the gorilla (EMC) are joining forces and from some perspectives making big plans to corner the market.
