The Six Five team discusses NetApp Insight 2024
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: So Dan, The Six Five was at NetApp Insight ’24 in Vegas. You met with senior executives, CEO. What did they announce? What did they announce?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, there’s a lot going on there, and our team wrote some great pieces on kind of the in-depth announcements. We’ve got some real storage nerds, but we maybe most importantly, want to note that the evolution at the evolution at NetApp is all about the pivot, right? It’s all about the pivot from being in storage to being one of these kind of new data or they like to call it, they call it IDI. They refuse to do the AI whitewashing. That was their, Gabie Boko and George Kurian I spent time with will tell you this, but intelligent data infrastructure is about, are we starting to see an era of limiting the sort of stack for accessing data from the application layer?
And NetApp is a first party inside of all the public cloud providers, so their file system is used first party like basically ISV, OEM, where people don’t know when they’re using AWS or they’re using Google for a certain file, they’re using NetApp. But the other thing about it is as we’re building out vector file block object and we want to be able to essentially access all the storage across our data estate. In the long run, why do we need these middle layers of abstraction for data management? We heard about data lakes, data warehouses, data streams, data swamps. I’m joking, those don’t exist, I don’t think. But at some point we’re seeing VAST Data do this, we’re seeing NetApp do this, we’re seeing Pure Storage do this. And we’re seeing other companies like Weka entering the stage of saying, “Hey, can we access that data in some meaningful way through using metadata and using the different storage archetypes to allow the application to directly call the storage and file system to basically do AI?” And that’s interesting where the company’s heading.
Another thing that they’re very focused on that I think is interesting is the combination of being able to do logic and being able to do speed of being able to update data sets. Now, if you understand the way storage works, and this is a little bit nerdy, but essentially you have to continually take these kind of snapshots of the entire storage ecosystem. And each time data is updated, you have to move the data to make it accessible again to the applications. In most cases, it’s done in its entirety. So every time you have to move the data, it’s a massive project. It can be terabytes and terabytes of data, sometimes hundreds of terabytes, sometimes more that has to be updated continuously so applications have the newest, you remove all the duplication. So NetApp’s basically built a system that can only continually update in an agile fashion where you’re only updating very quickly the data that’s new and what’s changed, as opposed to having to move all the data. So that’s another thing that they’re doing that’s pretty interesting.
But overall, Pat, I think what we’re seeing now is just a new era. We’re seeing a new era of companies that are software-driven, enabling storage for an AI world where I think we’re going to start to see some of these traditional data management software competing with storage companies and creating a kind of a new layer. And Pat, I don’t know if this also opens up an M&A conversation. Does Cloudera pair up with somebody? Does Databricks pair up with somebody? Does storage… like, HCI kind of, that was a thing for a while. Are we seeing kind of the new era of converging infrastructure with software to make AI more available? Good event. It was great to spend some time with their leadership team and I did it all in about four hours.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s the way to do it sometimes. So, yeah, Dan. Yeah, NetApp was formed right around when I started my career in the early ’90s, they were formed in ’92. And it seems like every five to 10 years you have hot new storage companies coming out. NetApp didn’t create the first NAS, it was a company called OSPEX, but what they did do is they radically simplified storage and made it easier for different servers to share storage. I think it was a first product called Filer, hopefully, I’m not mistaken on this. But more importantly, NetApp was first with their public cloud interactions, I believe it’s called ONTAP. I’m hot on hybrid multi-cloud fabrics, but NetApp, even though they were selling a ton of arrays on-prem and in colo and in private cloud, gave you the ability to have a common type of pane of glass to be able to move data around on-prem and in the cloud.
NetApp was the first with what they announced, it’s fast data. I have to give them a credit here, a much smaller and nimbler company. But NetApp’s scale is far and wide. They’re a fricking huge company. So this natural compression of the stack between storage and the data makes sense. We see that in every industry when you’re trying to grow. And it’s not just growth for the sake of growth, there is a performance advantage to compressing the stack and integrating files, integrating data and metadata out there, particularly in the age of AI. And then if you can pull that data in and give the privileges, the security privileges that actually makes your generative AI or even machine learning access a lot more secure. So, I’m hoping to learn more about what they brought out at Insight ’24. And Matt is going to be, and my team is going to be doing an analysis of what he thinks. What’s pretty cool is just seeing a ton of innovation here with Vast Data, with NetApp, and Pure. The one company I’m not hearing a lot about is Dell. Where is Dell in this entire game? Again, to be determined.
