The Rest of the Story

I was on the phone with Network Appliance, talking about their "Uncompromised Security" initiative, which I chose not to blog on the assumption that you're hearing this type of news elsewhere, but I got some interesting other information from them.They have reorganized their business to reflect the very issues we face in the Enterprise. I think it's a solid move, and I think it's about time someone did it.

You know how it goes in the enterprise, things move slowly because you can't afford make changes that will bring business systems down. This is particularly true of big infrastructure items like mainframes and storage. My experience with Storage Administrators is predictable "I'll upgrade when it breaks, not before". Understandable, don't fix what isn't broke.

But then we get the security people, who work on the motto of "if it's got a known vulnerability, it's broke." Another valid viewpoint that must be balanced against the Storage Admin to come up with the plan that works best for your organization.

It is safe to say though that the security guy wants about 100x the amount of change that the storage guy wants. They are on completely different ends of the spectrum. And neither is really wrong.

NetApp has built their organization up to reflect these divergent needs. They have moved security and select other non-infrastructure, high change groups into a separate unit, and are encouraging them to go nuts with updates. Quality isn't skipped, but they're diverging from the storage industry release cycles, which are traditionally very slow. They're calling this group "emerging markets".

I think it's cool. Nimble like a startup where it's needed, steady and only updating you when it's absolutely necessary elsewhere.Other vendors that play in both storage and security, take note. I think you'll see this setup working well for NetApp, I hope you follow suit.