From boring to personal: Challenges of Data Management

How do you see the data management business evolving in the next five years?

I believe that data needs to become more infrastructural. It needs to evolve the way that the networking industry has. Once upon a time, people ran networks in silos. That sounds crazy, but if you go back far enough it's true. DEC had DECnet, IBM had SNA and Token Ring. Every server vendor had its own network. But in the 1980s, when people started installing PCs everywhere, they needed a network that would connect everything up. You can't have client/server computing if the clients can't talk to the servers.

And so networking turned into a shared resource - like a utility, managed centrally, but used by people all over. We believe that data must move in the same direction. To understand the key characteristics of a data infrastructure, think of things that are true of a network infrastructure.

Once you install a network, it should live forever. It should work without disruption even as old elements fail or go obsolete and new ones are added. It should scale from tiny to giant, as your company grows and as Moore's law makes everything bigger and faster. And it should be smart enough to automate away many of the management decisions.

You have stepped into cloud services and data protection as a service. How is that working out for you?

NetApp does not offer cloud services, but we sell to companies that do, and that has been a very good business for us. We estimate that we have 1.2 billion customers using some form of cloud service that is powered by NetApp. People sometimes ask us whether we worry that cloud computing will kill our business. We don't see it that way. Cloud computing is about whether people will buy their own computers, or whether they will get IT services by accessing somebody else's computers over the network. Either way, somebody somewhere is building a data centre, and we view them as a potential customer. We already have many of the world's largest data installation. We have more than 15 customers with more than 50 petabytes. Our largest customer has almost 900 petabytes. Point is, we are well positioned to help people building very large clouds.

How is NetApp performing in the Asia Pacific market and do you see any special trends here in the storage space?

We're still seeing a strong growth momentum in Asia Pacific across all markets. In our most recent quarter, the Asia Pacific region grew by 55 percent year over year. Cost efficiency will continue to be a trend and our customers have invested in Data ONTAP to keep their IT costs down without having to make significant capital investments. It goes without saying that doing more with less is probably a mantra we will hear this year.