Network Appliance at Pacific Crest Securities Data Center 3.0 Conference - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

SURESH VASUDEVAN, SVP AND GM, NETWORK APPLIANCE: Good morning and thanks for joining me. In the life of the company, we've grown in the storage space faster than the industry as a whole and faster than any of our competitors, and consistently for the last several years. And one of the fundamental foundations on which our group (inaudible) is our ability to innovate in the technology space faster than anybody else.

I'm going to focus on four of the many areas that we innovate in -- that in fact, data center architectures -- specifically how do we simplify complexity of deploying network storage within data centers through our unified storage architecture, how do we address data center efficiency concerns with storage efficiency, and addressing data proliferation. And lastly, I want to touch on what it takes to move from managing storage as being thought of as multiple devices in a data center, to being deployed as an infrastructure layer within the data center.

Let me start first with the unified storage. This is a foundation for how we deploy our storage systems and how our customers deploy storage systems. In a nutshell, when customers are making choices about whether SAN is more appropriate, NAS is more appropriate, different kinds of storage technologies are more appropriate; whether it's for deployment in a data center or in a remote office; whether it's for deployment in primary application storage, like if it's for Exchange databases, etc.; or for secondary applications like disk-based backup, every time a customer has to make a choice about what to deploy, our approach is that our operating systems and platforms are common across all of those. We have the same operating system, the same software, the same hardware, and therefore the same management processes irrespective of the choice you're making.

The contract and the way that the rest of the industry approaches is by saying that for each and every separate application, you have separate storage systems and separate approaches for managing those storage systems. So the neg effect is a lot more complexity. And when we think about the benefits that our customers have seen, the benefits accrue in primarily three areas.

The first one is in investment protection, in that a choice you make does not lock you into a particular approach forever, and so you get investment protection as a customer. Secondly is lower capital spend overall. You're always to deploy a single storage system, a single storage infrastructure irrespective of what your needs. And third, it dramatically lowers the capital spend -- and perhaps the biggest benefit is really in the area of administrative cost. Once you understand what -- how to do backup of our storage systems, once you understand how to replicate data, how to administer our system, it scale irrespective of what you're using the storage system for.

We now have over 40% of our systems are deployed in a unified context where people are not just using them for SAN or NAS, not just in datacenters, but also in remote offices. 40% of our deployment go in a unified fashion, and that's been a fairly dramatic benefit for all our customers.

But most significant -- the one aspect of it is what the customer sees from having a unified storage architecture. It's also being a source of significant competitive advantage for us as a company. Every time we introduce an innovation within storage, it automatically parlays into every time of deployment that a customer has; data center, SAN, NAS, remote office, primary, secondary. And so we've been able to deploy innovation a lot faster. In contrast, almost any feature that we deploy, most of -- the rest of the industry has to implement that in every one of their storage systems.

Let me give you an example. Thin provisioning was something we introduced about three years ago, and it's automatically available irrespective of what platform you deploy with us. It's only in the last year that many of our competitors have started to talk about thin provisioning, and often you'll find them in one of the many …