Recently we have had many wins where HP has replaced NetApp with HP 3PAR. Sometimes this comes as a surprise to people because NetApp sells a NAS system and HP 3PAR is a SAN system. Right?
There are a lot of different ways to look at NAS, and it can be confusing. So I thought I would put forward one way of looking at it that makes it clear how HP lines up versus NetApp. For this discussion, I am looking at business uses of NAS, not small offices or consumers. Also, the pie charts below are for illustrative purposes and do not represent actual market size.
I split NAS into three buckets:
1) "Traditional NAS" is a file server “appliance.” This is where NetApp has done well. It is also where our new HP X5000 NAS based on Windows Storage Server will be used. People use these systems for general file storage, home directories, file and print, and so forth. It is also where a lot of customers choose to use general-purpose servers as their file servers. HP sells lots and lots of servers here.
2) "Scale-out NAS" is where multiple servers are pooled together to create one massive file server that goes well beyond the scale of an appliance. This is where the HP X9000 IBRIX sells. Scale-out NAS is used for a wide variety of emerging applications, some of which are shown here.
Here's where it gets interesting:
3) "NAS used for SAN" is a NAS appliance that has a Fibre Channel or iSCSI interface added to it. NetApp calls this unified storage. It is still a NAS appliance underneath, but you can use it for SAN.
So where are we replacing NetApp with HP 3PAR today? Any place where NetApp is being used as a SAN. #3 equals HP 3PAR. During 2011, HP has established HP 3PAR as the best SAN technology in the world. NetApp offers a fine NAS appliance. (Some of my marketing people might not like me complimenting NetApp but I give them a lot of credit. They are a fine competitor and have obviously done well in that space.) But whenever we see NetApp systems being used for SAN, it is easy pickings. HP 3PAR does more, has better economics, and is easier to use. More than a few customers have decided to move their SAN workloads to HP 3PAR and went back to just using NetApp for traditional NAS. Others are removing NetApp altogether.
The next couple of years are going to be interesting as HP and NetApp both work to offer customers new options in the scale-out NAS area as well as the traditional NAS area. Here are HP’s top products in each segment:
Catch the latest Converged Infrastructure announcement news from HP:
> New HP 3PAR Storage Systems – Peer-Based Federation Eliminates Storage Boundaries
