Marc Nicholas wrote:
Philip Thomas wrote:
The NetFORCE 1000 looks like might fill the low-end server market that Netapp has conveniently vacated. ;-)
Did you hear this??? This is the same stuff I was preaching for the last 3+ years to any at your company who is willing to listen.
I share your sentiments...but I can see the lack of interest on NetApp's part when their core product line will probably generate US$300m in the coming year.
Our very first product was a $10-$15K box, designed to be sold through resellers.
It just about killed the company.
About the only way to sell low-end products is through resellers, and resellers -- for the most part -- just aren't very good at evangelizing new technologies, like WAFL, snapshots, and appliances.
Business and marketing types have a whole discipline called "channel marketing" that focuses on this area. The theory is that it's very difficult to sell low end products until there is "market pull", which means that people already know about the product and know that they want it. (Don't ask me how Apple survived. Maybe the rules are different for end-user products than for servers?)
I'm a big fan of the low-end space, and even when we were forced to abandon it, I believed that it was only a matter of time until we'd be back. I still don't think NAS and NetApp are house-hold terms to every system administrator, but we're certainly getting closer.
To open a real can-of-worms, what would people on this list like to see in a low-end product offering? (Sub-$10k chassis).
This hypothetical discussion would be of great interest to me. :-)
Dave