NetApp gets the OpEx model right

Ever since the Dot-Com Boom, enterprise storage vendors have had “Capacity on Demand” programs that promised a pay-as-you-use consumption model for storage. Most of these programs met with very limited success, as the realities of the back-end financial models meant that the customers didn’t get the financial and operational flexibility to match the marketing terms.

The main cause of the strain was the requirement for some sort of leasing instrument to implement the program; meaning that there was always some baseline minimum consumption commitment, as well as some late-stage penalty payment if the customer failed to use as much storage as was estimated in the beginning of the agreement. This wasn’t “pay-as-you-use” as much as it was “just-pay-us-no-matter-what”.

NetApp has recently taken a novel approach to this problem, by eliminating the need for equipment title to change from NetApp to the financial entity backing the agreement. With NetApp’s new NetApp OnDemand, NetApp retains title of the equipment, and simply delivers what’s needed.

An even more interesting feature of this program is that the customer pays NOT for storage, but for capacity within three distinct performance service levels, each defined by a guaranteed amount of IOPS/TB, and each of these service levels has a $/GB/Mo associated with it.

To determine how much of each service level is needed at a given customer, NetApp will perform a free “Service Design Workshop” that uses the Netapp OnCommand Insight (OCI) tool to examine each workload and show what the IO Density (IOPS/TB) is for each. From there, NetApp simply delivers storage that is designed to meet those workloads (along with consideration for growth, after consulting with the customer). They include the necessary software tools to monitor the service levels (Workflow Automation, OnCommand Unified Manager, and OCI), as well as Premium support and all of the ONTAP features that are available in their Flash and Premium bundles.

Customers can start as low as $2k/month, and go up AND DOWN with their usage, paying only for what they use from a storage perspective AFTER efficiencies such as dedupe, compression, and compaction are taken into account. More importantly, the agreement can be month-to-month, or annually; the shorter the agreement duration of course, the higher the rate. This is America, after all.

The equipment can sit in the customer premises, or a co-location facility- even a near-cloud situation such as Equinix, making the Netapp Private Storage economics a true match for the cloud compute that will attach to it.

A great use case for NetApp OnDemand is with enterprise data management software, such as Commvault, which can be sold as a subscription as well as as a function of capacity. Since the software is now completely an OpEx, the target storage can be sold with the same financial model – allowing the customer to have a full enterprise data management solution with the economics of SaaS. Further, there would be no need to over-buy storage for large target environments, it would grow automatically as a function of use. This would be the case with any software sold on subscription, making an integrated solution easier to budget for as there is no need to cross the CapEx/OpEx boundary within the project.

This new consumption methodology creates all sorts of new project options. The cloud revolution is forcing companies such as NetApp to rethink how traditional offerings can be re-spun to fit the new ways of thinking in the front offices of enterprises. In my opinion, NetApp has gotten something very right here.