NetApp founder Dave Hitz speaks during Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference in San Francisco

From loudly opening a new energy-efficient data center in North Carolina to making its first steps into the cloud-enabler game with September’s roll-out of its new operating system Ontap 8.0, storage vendor NetApp has been maintaining high visibility in both advertising real-estate on the Web and technology headlines.

In the first weeks of October NetApp CFO Steve Gomo announced that the company expects per-share earnings of about $0.30-$0.35 in its second and third fiscal quarters, instantly causing the value of its shares to jump up by five percent, according to news reports.

The company’s founder Dave Hitz and SVP of the Storage Solutions Group Jay Kidd shared with DatacenterDynamics what NetApp is currently focusing on and what is to come in the future.

Increasing storage efficiency will remain one of the company’s primary focuses. Having already integrated technologies like data deduplication, cloning and thin provisioning into its systems, NetApp is now looking into software compression, Kidd said. It is also beginning to incorporate flash memory into enterprise storage systems.

“Right now it’s still very expensive and very high-performance, so there’s not that much of it,” he said, adding that he expects the cost of flash memory to continue to decrease. “Every iPod that gets purchased will drive the cost of flash down. That’ll drive a greater penetration in enterprise storage and that’ll save quite a bit of power and space as well.”

The company is delivering flash as a cache system at the moment but is planning to also provide it as an SSD-type system in the future.

To date, data deduplication has proven to be the most widely adopted of storage efficiency technologies NetApp provides.

“Data dedupe has been the fastest adoption pick-up of anything we’ve ever released,” said Hitz, the company’s founder who currently acts as its executive vice president.

More than 40,000 NetApp systems that use data deduplication have been installed by customers.

The number-one driver of adoption of storage-efficiency technologies has been the economic meltdown, Hitz said. Those who were reluctant to adopt new technologies because they did not feel a pressing need to do so began thinking about them more seriously once the recession caused budgets to shrink.

As the basic technology for storing data is slow to change, efficient use of space is where storage companies like NetApp find themselves competing today.

“We all build it out of the same silicon,” Hitz said. “We all use roughly the same disk drives from different vendors, so the only thing you can do is use software that helps you drive down the total amount you store.”

Of course, the best type of storage efficiency technology depends on the application. Test and development requirements of Oracle environments make cloning a desirable technology, NetApp founder said. “You need another copy of the same thing you already have a copy of? Boom, clone it!”

Deduplication has proven to be most useful with virtualized environments.

Another area of focus for NetApp is integration with other vendors’ management frameworks. “If you look at most customers, the way they view the world is through the Oracle Enterprise Manager or through vSphere or through Microsoft Management Console.”

NetApp is working on providing accessibility of its systems’ capabilities to system administrators through those frameworks.

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