Quoted at Byte and Switch about ONTAP GX

So I did something I don’t often do today. I answered some questions from a tech journalist. In this case, I talked to James Rogers at Byte and Switch about NetApp’s upcoming operating system, GX. Now the reason I don’t typically take press calls is simple: They always screw things up. Ironically enough that was a lesson I learned the hard way when my team briefed some journalists from Byte and Switch’s sister site, Light Reading, back when 360networks’ ambitous plans were making big waves in the networking world. One of my favourite aspects of blogging is that I can speak directly for myself and don’t have to worry about a journalist using a comment out of context, or outright misquoting me.

So fast forward a few years and I find myself now working for a very high profile research centre. Why would I take a call now and risk some clueless journalist misrepresenting me or, even worse, the centre? I think maybe it had something to do with the fact that I had just finished my morning espresso and was feeling the warm, loving embrace of the caffeine when James called. Or maybe it was because I had a particularly fun time with my 18 month old son this morning before heading into the office and was “disarmed”. Or maybe it because I’m not under any NDA and don’t have any inside knowledge of what NetApp is up to, so I didn’t have to worry about saying something I shouldn’t. Or maybe I just felt like James desparately needed to have someone give him an honest and up front take on what NetApp’s public announcement (that it would take years for the transition to GX to finish) actually meant to an existing customer.

The happy news is that the little “news analysis” piece represented our conversation fairly. He pretty much got the quotes right, and more importantly the intent and ideas too. Thanks James. I’ve been awfully nervous all day, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I read the page and nothing was hideously wrong.

The crux of my first few quotes could really be summarized more succinctly as this: For the GX transition to be successful a filer running GX still has to still be, well, a filer. I don’t mean that NetApp has to emulate ONTAP at the CLI or web interface level, but rather that they need to stay true to the filer experience. Which means it can’t betray the core NetApp concepts, loose the ease of use, automation, interaction model, etc. A GX filer has to behave like the filers customers have come to known and trust.

I don’t think James quite understood that, which is sort of to be expected since I suspect he’s never actually used a filer (correct me if I’m wrong James, if you read this) so he couldn’t appreciate what the filer experience is like compared to many of the storage products out there. Which, I suspect, is why Steve Gomo indicated that GX adoption would start in a few particular market segments. Again, I didn’t actually participate in the NetApp call and I certainly don’t have any privileged info on NetApp’s strategy, but I know *I* would start with niches where keeping the filer experience “whole” isn’t as important. Start with the customers that are willing and able to deal with something that’s different because it gets them capabilitiies they don’t currently have (i.e. global namespaces and horizonal performance scaling). Then take your time to slowly merge the features and experience of the two operating systems until GX simply becomes a natural progression for customers.

Which from what I understand is what NetApp has already been doing to a limited extent with SpinServer installs. Of course there’s also some high profile Spinnaker customers that have been left high and dry, so it’s been hard to gauge where NetApp’s commitment has been up until now. So the real news here is that now you’re going to be able to run GX, the ONTAP/SPINOS hybrid on “real” NetApp hardware. Hardware that you can also run ONTAP 7G on. Finally, GX is now the official final destination. That wasn’t actually clear before. At the very least, this is neat because any NetApp customer with 3000 or above hardware will be able to take GX for a spin! (heh. pun.)

Hard for the short-attention-span fire-and-forget press to dig into the announcment like that, eh? But I can’t complain. James did well and Byte and Switch readers got the 30-second version of a 15 minute conversation. Which, for reasons that escape me, seems to be what most IT managers are looking for.

One advantage I had in getting my point across is that I’d been professionally trained on how to talk to journalists back in the dotcom boom. But I haven’t used those skills in a good many years now… So I did my best to consider what James was *really* looking for when he asked questions, considered how he would use my response when I answered, and made sure to stop and repeat a sentence if I detected that he was scribbling down a choice quote. Happily, James came across as genuine and although he was clearly rushing to be the first to get a story out and I may very well have simply been the first customer listed in NetApp’s case study section to pick up the phone, he took the time to listen to my explanations and let me ramble a bit as us techies are prone to do.

The final comment I’ll make is that I felt awfully empowered after the call knowing that if James did mess something up, I could rebuke it here and get the message across to the people that matter. In that sense, blogs are changing the face of tech journalism I think, bringing a higher level of scrutiny and maybe even responsiblity than ever before. That being said, I have to admit that I don’t rely on *any* of the mainstream tech publishers or sites or magazines to form my opinions on storage technology. But maybe I’ll check out Byte and Switch from time to time, now.