By Editor
Virtualization and Cloud adoption rates continue to soar in the Middle East, with storage giant NetApp one of the main beneficiaries. Graham Porter MENA Channel Manager and Fadi Kanafani Regional Director, MENA and Pakistan discuss the company’s strategy for the evolving data centre
Discuss the impact of Flash technology in the age of Cloud
GP: There’s a misconception that only the smaller storage companies are involved in flash. In reality, NetApp is a major Flash vendor and we offer a whole range of flash arrays, including a Hybrid array which is a mix of flash and traditional disk arrays. We are making a lot of investments in this space and we have been able to double our sales with over 1,300 pure flash arrays sold, a rate that is doubling year on year from 2013.
Flash and Cloud is what most of the customers like to hear about. Working with Cisco offers us a new opportunity to sell flash in integrated systems. In the last one year, because of our R&D capabilities, about half of our products have been refreshed. We typically invest 14% of our revenues in R&D as opposed to around 2% for our competitors. This means that partners have an up-to-date, state of the art product to sell-they’ve got Flash products and now the integrated stack that we are offering with Cisco.
Discuss NetApp’s FlexPod and how integrated systems will impact enterprise storage moving forward
GP: Integrated systems are growing extremely well-the prediction from Gartner is that by 2015, 35% of all storage sales will be integrated systems. The FlexPod, is a combination of networking servers from Cisco, NetApp storage with software from VMware for virtualization. The result is an integrated stack which solves the problems companies had in the past of buying and building their solutions and trying to make them work. The FlexPod is configured to work from the get go and is typically used by customers wishing to build a private cloud and then start to move towards a hybrid public.
FK: We have 50 validated designs between us and Cisco for this integrated stack which makes it the number one converged cloud-based solution in the market now, a market that now exceeds 3B dollars globally. We have in excess of 4000 customers on the FlexPod which is showing over 80% growth from 2013 to 2014. The good thing about our Cloud solutions, our customers can enjoy the services if they prefer to stay private, if they want to go public or adopt hybrid cloud deployments. Our Data ONTAP allows them to manage their data no matter where the data resides-private, public or somewhere in between-which is the key differentiator for our platform.
Discuss some deployments with NetApp’s Flash solutions and the benefits therein for customers
GP: An example is SAP and their HANA solution which allows them to do business intelligence in memory. The challenge in the past was in the amount of memory you would get; but now with Flash, you are guaranteed large data transfer very quickly. This facilitates a lot of intelligence and analytics that you could not do before. So a lot of customers are looking at flash and realizing they can take a large amount of data and manipulate that very quickly, something they simply could not do before. We have the solution with SAP HANA and every kind of customer is now able to take decisions by analysing their Big Data and being able to do this with flash and software applications.
What in your opinion is NetApp’s USP?
FK: When customers are trying to balance risk & cost vs performance, benefits & features, we do not believe that one size fits all. So our systems allow customers to have flash and disk at the same time and within the same system and both analysed with the same operating system. And that is another differentiator with NetApp, depending on your workload, you can decide to use disk for certain applications and certain workloads, flash for others and then customers can segment their system so that it runs separate workloads differently.
Discuss the state of Cloud adoption in the region and what is holding back many organizations
FK: What we have found unique here in the Middle East is that data sovereignty is very important. Certain governments prefer that their data stay within their boundaries and that is why the private cloud is more feasible in the region. We see more private cloud deployments. A lot of storage vendors are thus working closely with local service providers to provide the hybrid cloud.
GP: Cloud implementations here in the region via integrated systems like the FlexPod have gone up by over 60% between 2013 and 2014. Still, this market is at least a couple years behind Europe and America. In the region now you have companies such as e-Hosting Data Fort and Equinix offering hosted services. We are also working with various Telcos in the region so that they can offer services such as hosting, co-location services and applications.
Some of the larger partners they have their own large data centres and cloud solutions with Cisco for instance building four large data centres with their partners becoming resellers of cloud services. We have local partners that have built three data centres and now some of these partners are thinking of how they can sell services instead of selling the boxes.