Great company past its prime. - Anonymous NetApp Employee Review

I got caught in the last round of layoffs, but I am not negative towards them for that. I liked working there; I liked the people, but I was looking around anyhow, so it worked out well for me. The reason I was looking around is I do not see how it is possible for the company to survive without changing their business a lot. The change will require massive layoff. They have had them on a regular basis, but I suspect (I have no knowledge of this) that they will increase. What I am saying is nothing you can't read in the trade publications. Storage companies like NetApp face competition from the cloud. Even if they do well selling to cloud providers, there will be fewer data centers than if every company had their own and, thus, less need for NetApp's products. Another is that they made an enormous commitment to clustered Data ONTAP, and I think the technology is outdated. I have many friends in Silicon Valley outside the company that work in businesses that have massive amounts of data, and many of them are shifting to commodity solutions (or started out that way). For instance, Facebook has used (and helped invent) Gluster, hdfs is used under Hadoop, which now being used by banks and other enterprise customers that are the kind of customer that NetApp serves. These commodity solutions stripe data across a large number of inexpensive Linux systems and use block level replication for performance and data protection. Though this requires more physical discs because the storage is not as compact as RAID, especially with deduplication, reconstructing failed discs is much faster, and it provides performance benefits. You can buy Linux systems for $9. Their hybrid flash solutions are excellent, well designed and reliable (like everything they do) but, you can buy hybrid drives at Best Buy. It is not the same thing but, they are high-performance and when used in conjunction with the kind of filesystems I mention above can give blazing performance. They could go into this market because better administration tools are needed, the deduplication problem has not been solved and much is needed but, it is a commodity market, which is much different than their current business. They are also competing in the flash market. They have no choice here but to be competitive on price. I can't imagine how they could maintain their margins if they have to do that so, again, they would have to go into a commodity business. I want to reiterate that I have absolutely no idea of what they plan to do and I am just telling you the logic that had me looking elsewhere. The way it looked to me is that their high-end market was going to get eaten away by lower priced commodity solutions. It happened to IBM, it happened to DEC, it happened to Sun -- IBM was big enough to survive but the other two are gone. HP successfully switched to a commodity business but not without carnage in the workforce. Finally, it is looking more and more like memristors are going to work. They are being manufactured. They can be manufactured in current fab facilities with some modification. Flash memory requires specially build fabs. Also, flash has a short lifespan. You can only write to it a small number of times, and it stops working where the writes have happened. For that reason, the software that manages the flash has to be relatively complicated. It needs to keep track of where writes have happened and choose the parts of the memory that have been written to the least. Memristors are so fast that they can be used both as long-term storage and as system memory. That means there won't be any external memory. Since they can be manufactured in ordinary fabs, the price should become quite cheap. They use 1/100th the amount of power, and a terabyte can fit in an area the size of a postage stamp, a petabyte in the volume of a sugar cube. That means even if the initial price is higher the cost of owning them is much lower. Besides all that, they can do millions of writes where flash can do thousands. It will be several years until memristors are ready for prime time, but they are being manufactured now. NetApp has a long history of being adaptable, and I would not be surprised at all if they made the changes necessary to survive in the changing environment. Unfortunately, I can't see how that could happen without a massive reduction in force. I started learning the new technology in preparation for moving on, and I did not even have to apply for a job. I took some time off to do some projects I had been putting off and after I decided to get serious about finding a new job I had one in days. Think about it. NetApp is laying people off and, logically, they will have to lay off more. The new industries that are replacing them are gobbling up people as fast as they can. You can learn there, it is a great place to work, the people are nice and it might be worthwhile. The tech industry is always changing but, be prepared for this to be a place that will be shrinking, not growing. After a while, that gets depressing.