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It’s the middle of summer. While for some that means time for a well-needed vacation, for those of us in the enterprise storage industry, it means that VMworld is just around the corner. Over the past few years, VMworld has become the premier multi-vendor storage industry event. While there is some debate on whether that status may be up for grabs over the next few years, VMworld still serves as an opportunity to take stock of the latest in storage innovations and capture a glimpse of how storage vendors' strategies are progressing with their customers.

Warmer weather in the US also means the heating up of what we often call "show season." While it was intentionally not a big audience (after all it was just analysts rather than an end-user event), the NetApp event this week in Boulder, Colorado was certainly engaging.

Fresh off of some much-improved business results, the NetApp team was justifiably proud of where it is today. And that's not just about its revenues and finances, it's also about vision and execution. And those things - together with a willingness to embrace change - are what enable organizations to achieve longevity. With NetApp celebrating its 25 year anniversary, knowing the ingredients to a long life is especially vital. After all the average life of Fortune 500 organizations is only somewhere between 40 and 50 years....and roughly 50% of the 1999 Fortune 500 was gone within a decade!

As a storage analyst, I am repeatedly asked to compare one storage technology solution to another. Several years ago, this wasn’t very difficult. In enterprise storage, there were really only a couple options: SAN or NAS. When comparing SAN storage, evaluations looked at performance, data resiliency features, and price. When comparing NAS solutions, technical comparisons likely emphasized price and capacity scaling, along with a myriad of different file system-specific features such as how granular the system could manage quotas or snapshots. Depending on how you look at it, those might be considered the good old days for a storage analyst. Comparing solutions was relatively easy.

So, it is hard not to have fun with word repetition at times - so here are a few insightful insights from Insight, NetApp's annual customer and partner conference that was held last week. My actual theme for this commentary is about NetApp's surprises - simultaneously both the existence and lack thereof! But before digging into that a little more, take a look at this ESG On Location video that Steve Duplessie and I recorded at the event.

When do we stop using the term "flash storage"? When does it become just "storage"? And when do we as an industry shift the qualifier to "mechanical spinning disk media"? That future may be a lot sooner than you might think. The industry perception of flash storage is transforming from why to why not as I write. At some of the more recent storage industry events I have attended, when a question is asked about the potential of flash storage, the storage administrators in the audience are just as likely as the presenter to speak up and sing the praises of all-flash storage.

SolidFire's third Analyst Event was its first as a part of NetApp. The change of ownership was evident but not onerous. Yes, there was talk of ONTAP and the rest of NetApp's portfolio, but mainly the focus was the increasing opportunity for, investments in, and expectations of, the SolidFire platform; and that's the key word — NetApp sees it's new offering as a 'platform' rather than a 'tuck in'.

For the title for this week’s blog on NetApp’s new release, I decided to provide a brief homage to a ‘90s cult film classic, while probably simultaneously dating myself. And as the title suggests, NetApp’s ONTAP version 9.0 presents a lot to love for the enterprise storage consumer — extending NetApp’s Data Fabric capabilities and helping reduce the cost of flash storage.

This month saw another NetApp Insight event, and it was hot! By ‘hot’ I don’t mean the weather in Las Vegas, I’m talking about the whether we experienced there. Let me explain: NetApp formally convened its event the day after Dell’s intent to acquire EMC was announced….whether this turns out to be a cloud or a silver lining remains to be seen, but for once NetApp seemed determined to be a master of its destiny way more than the market-passenger (albeit it a highly successful one!) that it has all-too-often been.

Watch the video, where my colleagues Jason Buffington, Scott Sinclair, and I recap the event, and then read my further thoughts below. 

Candidly, whenever I spend a good bit of time looking closely at the breadth of NetApp data protection capabilities, I usually leave with the same two impressions:

• Wow, I forgot that they do all of those 'Data Protection' things, based on what is built-in
• Why don’t they talk about it more?!?

The latter was addressed by new CEO, George Kurian, who assured folks that NetApp would be more vocal in driving the awareness of what they do well, what they have done well for so long (albeit not always noticed) and their visions for the future.

This morning, NetApp announced AltaVault—the next iteration of what was Riverbed SteelStore, which was acquired in 2014.