DoSTOR July22,2008--NetApp Storage Forum 2008 was held in Kerry Centre Hotel, Beijing on July17. Dan Warmenhoven, NetApp chairman and CEO presented at the conference and shared NetApp’s innovative idea on driving datacenter innovation.
More than 800 people, Including customers, partners, analysts, journalists etc. attended the meeting. We also saw VMware, Symantec, Brocade, CommVault and Riverbed there. After the keynote speech NetApp arranged three sub-forums. The theme of those there were: virtualization, backup and recovery, data center efficiency.
Though NetApp’s rival EMC entered customer market, Dan said that NetApp would still focus on the enterprise market. Because the value of NetApp are their software, solutions and data management capability.
EMC announced its support of SSD in its Symmetrix DMX-4 early this year. What’s NetApp’s opinion about SSD? Dan took an optimistic attitude toward SSD’s future. He even agreed that flash memory may replace FC disk in the future.
There is only one main vendor in server market--Intel. Many manufactures just buy core technology from it. Dan noted that this would be the future of storage market too. There will be only one or two large storage vendors. NetApp wants to be be one of them.