NetApp’s been partnering around a lot lately.
Following the deal it is doing with Cisco and VMware to offer an optimized next-generation data center hardware architecture, the “good little file server company” that grew up [as once described by its chairman, Dan Warmenhoven] has re-upped its deal with CA to keep their cloud management development moving.
Thus, the companies will continue to enmesh CA’s virtualization, automation and service assurance product line with NetApp’s storage management secret sauce and make it all work well together.
After all, there cannot be too many people working on how to control all this new data center stuff, can there? IBM, Hewlett-Packard, EMC, Novell, BMC, and Dell are among the biggest names that offer cloud management software and services.
Nice to have choices, because this sector — from the looks on the faces of all the analysts The Station talks to on a regular basis — is going straight through the roof over the next 12 to 18 months, which probably means serious price competition is not far away.
At the moment, these are pretty much premium-priced products and services. Let’s revisit this next February and see what’s changed. We’ll bet the landscape will be quite different by then.