NetApp Buying Onaro

Just saw this one.  Network Appliance is buying Onaro, the company with too many vowels in its name. 

Too bad.  I kind of liked Onaro.  The cool thing about the technology, which is miscast as “storage management” when in fact it is a capacity demand forecasting dashboard, was its potential to hold vendor feet to the fire. 

Basically, Onaro presented a picture of storage capacity usage trends that was a lot like a hurricane tracking chart, showing the user how soon they would run out of capacity given maximum, minimum and typical rates of usage.  After first being briefed on the product a couple of years ago, then again more recently, my suggestions for doing good with the product came down to the same two things. 

1. Connect the Onaro dashboard to back end asset management systems, so you could get the depreciated asset value of storage platforms that were being used to host data bits at any given time.  That would make it simple for you to assess what storage was costing you on various platforms and might provide a more granular understanding of when to migrate less frequently accessed data to lower cost media.
2. Enable a modeling feature that could be tied to vendor storage equipment purchase agreements.  That way, if a vendor promised that you that buying his latest foo would constrain the need to buy more storage for X number of years, you could use Onaro to build a forecast chart representing the vendor claims.  This “promised value track” could then be tracked against actual usage rates to compare reality to vendor claims.  If you had to go back to senior management to request funding for more storage sooner than you thought you would have to, given vendor representations about the “investment deferral value” of their offering, you wouldn’t have to fall on your sword.  You could hold the vendor legally responsible for his claims and demand compensation for their misrepresentation.  (Boy, would that have been fun to watch.)

Alas, the Onaro guys did neither of these things.  At last contact, they were all hot about what they were doing to map storage resource usage trends in VMware environments (double yawn).  In the final analysis, the ascendency of “shell game” technology on arrays (thin provisioning) and in fabrics (“SAN” virtualization) made it difficult to get an accurate picture of actual physical storage capacity or its rate of utilization.  Onaro confronted the increasingly daunting task of begging for access to every storage vendor’s API to get the info they needed (or that the vendor was willing to disclose) about capacity allocation on each storage array.

Good luck, NetApp, on your acquisition of yet another interesting piece of technology that first excited, then bored, a lot of storage technology observers.  You are moving us closer every day to a comprehensive NetApp managed storage solution.

Ahem.