For the nine months ending December 31, 2004, the Sunnyvale, California-based company posted net profit of $162.3m, up 40% from the same period of the previous year, on revenue that grew 38% to $1.1bn. For its third quarter alone, NetApp reported net profit up 50% at $60.1m on revenue that rose 39% to $412.7m.
Beyond the growth figures, however, what’s interesting is how block-level SAN storage, whether over iSCSI or FC, has grown as a percentage of overall revenue. It went from 23% in the company’s second quarter to 24% in the third, while the NearStore range of ATA-based devices for disk-to-disk backup went from 17% to 19%.
Add onto those two segment’s NetApp’s often overlooked caching business, whose products sell under the NetCache brand and delivered 4.5% of revenue in the latest quarter, and you’re left with the core NAS filer business on which NetApp made its name providing just 52.5% of total revenue.
The caching products have been part of the portfolio for many years, becoming something of a sideline business with the end of the internet boom, when all talk of content delivery networks dried up. The other player in that space, CacheFlow, had no NAS business to fall back on and so instead repositioned as security player in 2002, renaming itself to become Blue Coat Systems Inc.
On the other hand, the iSCSI and FC primary storage products, generically referred to as SAN-attached, and the NearStore range are both developments of the last four years, and show NetApp going beyond the NAS space to become a broader storage hardware vendor.
On the NAS side of the business meanwhile, developments are afoot to tighten relations with major application developers, said Andreas Koenig, VP of sales for EMEA.
We have a team working with SAP in Waldorf, and all their NetWeaver app server traffic goes over NAS, while Oracle use our NAS boxes for all their customer hosting business, he recounted. Oracle’s Grid initiative around the 10g version of its DBMS dovetails with NetApp’s own activities in this space, he went on.
The latest version of our OnTap operating system is called 7G because we have incorporated some of the first elements of the Spinnaker technology in it, he said referring to the company’s 2003 acquisition of dynamically scaling NAS developer Spinnaker Networks.
In particular we’ve got the virtualization bits in there, separating the physical from the logical and enabling cloning splitting and expanding of volumes on the fly. Right now that’s limited to two nodes, but over time NetApp will extend the capability to multiple nodes, a.k.a an n+1 capability.
