Technology Alliance Partnership Update Week of September 21 2012

Each week I bring a new blog Item referring to our partnership ecosystem and the potential technology challenges a joint solution can solve.  I spent some time at the NetApp RTP facility last week enjoying the fantastic Raleigh weather and enjoying the wonderful selection at their on campus cafeteria (very reasonable prices as well). What is most compelling about the NetApp and F5 story to me is that both organizations have had massive success in our respective markets by closely integrating our solutions with the most important mission critical applications in the enterprise.  F5 has been a leader in the ADC market because we maintain application availability, accelerate performance and accelerate the adoption of virtualized Tier I applications by making the user experience as good or better than in a dedicated compute environment.  The strength of our partnerships with VMware and Microsoft and the breadth of our portfolio of solutions is really quite stunning for a company of our size.  Tying this elegant and sophisticated technology together is a simple deployment model vi iApps and granular control via iControl. 

NetApp in many ways is a mirror image of F5 but has tightly coupled its storage technology and solutions to leading applications.  Rather than merely participating in the speeds and feeds battle, (which they clearly hold their own see: Flashcache, E-Series, C-mode etc.) they have tightly coupled their storage software technology, data protection software and thin\rapid provisioning technologies and tightly validated these solutions with leading virtualization and application vendors (VMware, Microsoft) .  A great deal of this work has helped NetApp to develop integrated reference architectures to support customers looking to virtualize their Tier I mission critical applications.

With the recent announcement of C-mode NetApp is again leapfrogging their competition in the ‘scale-out’ storage space providing both file (NFS/CIFs) as well as block (SAN, iSCSI, FCOE) functionality through a single pane of glass.  Now customers can take multiple powerful Netapp controllers and manage them as a single integrated unit providing customers up to 16TB of storage via a single management point.  Enterprises can now simplify and scale their storage environment and provide a storage platform capable of supporting a full scale data center transformation. 

We look forward to our continued joint success in the marketplace.