The sales experience

The basic process for purchasing a NetApp SAN or NAS device is a familiar one. You purchase their hardware through a VAR through a quoting/bidding process. Once you have a quote entered with NetApp, no VAR can get you lower pricing. Sort of.

When you purchase a NetApp device, you need to know that their prices are simply made up. You can purchase an $80,000 SAN configuration for $35,000 almost any time during the fiscal year. What's more impressive is that almost anybody can get this impressive discount, even though NetApp makes is seem as though they are bending over backwards for you. When purchasing a real SAN from a real manufacturer, you expect a discount of less than 50%. The only time a competing manufacturer would even dream of giving you a SAN for half of its list price or less is if that SAN is end-of-life and coming to end-of-support soon.

Speaking of prices, NetApp doesn't seem to actually publish any. Most hardware vendors keep their numbers quiet, but there are at least general figures you can find. Not for NetApp. The figures they give to their VARs appear to mean nothing, since they discount so deeply, and nobody appears to be publishing the original figures online. This isn't necessarily a bad business practice, but it does feel a bit shady.

NetApp's entire product line is built on the notion that their software adds value to their SAN hardware. To me, the value of a SAN is in the SAN itself. If the hardware can't stand alone and compete with other manufacturer's products, then it is not worth a second look. NetApp refuses to publish performance data about their SAN hardware. We are told this is because their hardware is best compared feature-to-feature and not IOPS to IOPS. They note that their WAFL technology and the onboard NVRAM that backs it means their write operations are faster than the competition, and their read operations are fast enough. I've actually found that in simple benchmarking scenarios, the NetApp falls flat on its face. More on the WAFL technology and why it's pointless in a later post.

Finally, their pre-sales help is pitiful. The expertise their pre-sales engineers have is minimal when compared to the required expertise of operating a SAN in any environment. They only know what the sales brochures and online videos tell them, and nothing more. This particular situation bit me when a feature that was supposed to work actually performed a completely different function. That, to me, was a huge problem. And to make matters worse, I had asked the same question in their "forums", which resulted in the same misinformation. If you're going to say that a product will perform a certain technical feature and you aren't a technical person, I will have much more respect for you if you tell me you'll have to check with someone with technical knowledge than if you just feed me a line of marketing B.S.