NetApp, Inc - Current Portfolio
NetApp’s current portfolio can be divided into three main categories.
· On-premises storage. These products include the ONTAP AFF and ASA systems, E-series and StorageGRID. NetApp also partners with Cisco to sell FlexPod, a converged infrastructure solution.
· Public Cloud solutions. These are a mix of services provided by NetApp directly or through public cloud vendors. The solutions include cloud-native storage, data protection and data management solutions.
· Hybrid Cloud solutions. These solutions include data protection, data governance and compliance, tiering and cloud bursting capabilities, all of which are now managed through the BlueXP portal.
The on-premises storage solutions represent hardware and software platforms that have evolved over the past three decades. In common with many legacy hardware vendors, NetApp still uses the same software core and hardware design from the first ONTAP systems developed in the early 1990s. Naturally, there has been a lot of evolution, updating the systems to support new protocols and media, improving performance with new processors and the ability to use more system memory.
The acquisition of SolidFire represented an opportunity to build a new architecture based on scale-out block storage. However, SolidFire was never designed as a high-performance solution, even though it was based on NAND flash technology. Instead, the SolidFire platform was built for service providers and private cloud architectures where every part of the deployment and management of storage needed to be delivered through an API with consistent performance.
As the public cloud has come to dominate the IT landscape and be the core location experiencing growth, the SolidFire platform has become redundant and is now discontinued.
Cloud Focused
Where the on-premises solutions provide stable and recurring revenue, NetApp has looked to the public cloud as a growth opportunity. Many on-premises vendors saw the public cloud as a threat to their future business. That concern has definitely materialised, with the decade of the 2010s representing flat revenue across all legacy IT vendors.
The public cloud journey started out as a bold aspiration to build an ecosystem called the Data Fabric that joined on-premises and cloud storage together while exposing a set of APIs for data management. The aim was to create a platform where NetApp and partners could develop solutions that processed and managed customer data wherever it resided.
That vision has been partially realised and delivered through a cloud portal, recently rebranded as BlueXP. This blog post from February 2022 shows the portal solutions, covering the areas of Compute Operations, Cloud Storage, Cloud Controls and Data Services & Analytics.
BlueXP remaps the services from the Cloud Portal into an architecture that was described as “Evolved Cloud” but has subsequently been dropped in favour of “Intelligent Data Infrastructure”, announced in March 2024. In a bifurcated design, BlueXP delivers the infrastructure and data services features, while the Spot portfolio implements application and compute services (mainly focused on optimisation). Together these two halves of the “NetApp Brain” (as we describe it in this post) will integrate to use NetApp “common services” such as single sign-on (more on this in a moment).
We believe that this architecture has a lot to offer but is currently underutilised. For example, the Spot services provide a significant amount of data that could be used to re-tier storage, move data between public/private clouds, identify security risks and optimise costs by placing compute in the best location, compared to moving data. So far, these capabilities are implemented piecemeal. There is much more work required to bring these two sets of solutions together in a more holistic overarching architecture. This post covers more on the Evolved Cloud concept.
Note: In January 2025, NetApp announced the offloading of the Spot FinOps portfolio to Flexera. Until that deal has completed, we have left the following section in place and will update it in a future revision of this X-Ray.