Interlude - Index of

Strategic Change | 149
SAN. But at one of our customer councils, he came to me and
said, “Dave, I wish that you guys would support SAN.”
I was stunned. “Jason, you’re a NAS guy. Why would you
want SAN?”
He said, “Here’s the deal. I’ve got this one application—
it’s not even that important, but I have to support it—and I
ran into some performance problems. I went to the vendor,
but they said, ‘We don’t support NAS, so we won’t help until
you switch.’” Jason added, “I don’t even think the problem is
related to NAS. They were looking for an excuse to put me
off. So anyway, I went to the purchasing department and told
them I needed a small SAN, but they told me they want to
reduce the number of vendors. That’s where it got ugly. They
said, ‘Isn’t NetApp your storage company? If they can’t give
you both SAN and NAS, then find a vendor who can.’”
Jason concluded, “It’d sure make my life easier if you
would do SAN.”
••
The hints were there, but I didn’t want to hear them. It wasn’t
just that I intellectually believed that NAS was better—cheaper
and good enough—I was emotionally invested as well. NetApp
created the NAS market, it had fueled our success, and we
were the primary defender and proponent. On a more personal
level, I was the public face of NAS for many years. At storage
conferences, our competitors would promote SAN, but I’d be
on stage explaining why NAS was better. I would talk about
low-end technology moving upmarket, how SAN was doomed
for sure, and hadn’t they seen this story before with mainframe