More detail from customer survey

August 24th, 2010 by epowell

As many of you that are users know from personal experience, Nexenta has been conducting a customer and user survey over the last several weeks.

We now have a lot of data to share.  I’m considering a webinar or other public conversation about it.  Feedback welcome.  Is this interesting to you or more so just to us :)

The data I share here is from 1937 surveys we sent out.  We received 668 fully complete surveys.  Thank you SurveyMonkey and for our crack marketing analytics team.  For those of you dying to know, someone in Latin America won the iPad raffle.

There are many comments from the survey to the effect that overall I’m happy, but…..(and I think some of those that commented read this blog).   We are responding to every question or issue raised in the survey.  There were 42 such responses.

We have statistically significant responses for the high level information I can share here however not for all the detailed cross tabs that we might really want to know.  This is one reason we are extending the survey currently by inviting an additional 5,000 responses.  So, if you are a registered user please check your email and spam filter if you are interested in another chance to win an iPad and to give your feedback; the invitation to fill out the survey is in our customer newsletter that is emailing over the next day or two.

Enough with the preliminaries.  There are a few ways to measure customer SAT.  You can ask them their satisfaction, you can ask them their propensity to recommend, and you can ask them their propensity to buy.  Here we did all three:

overall-sat

In a way this is a perfect storm for legacy storage vendors.  What we’re seeing is NexentaStor often being purchased under the radar - by divisions or developers or perhaps to spin up a new application.  As you can see word of mouth and propensity to purchase are even higher than customer satisfaction.  And then, over time, NexentaStor earns its keep and more and more storage and use cases migrate onto the platform.  More on that point later.

First, here is another view of customer SAT:

quality-of-relationshipBack of the envelope, those numbers seem about right.  We have 42 ‘complaints’ received out of the 667 responses, or 6.3%.  The above chart suggests approximately 5% of users have not had a good experience.

So our challenge is to pay attention to both sides of the equation.  Yes — follow up with those that have less than good experience but also make sure we understand why some 40% of customer sales are now coming from existing customers.  What do you all like so much?  Per my prior post, often it is features, not just the price.

Speaking of sales coming from existing customers, here is another graph that gives you some idea of adoption patterns.

share-of-walletPerhaps not surprisingly given the number of new users, NexentaStor tends not to be used for all the data in particular accounts.  We do see customers growing - as I mentioned above 40% of all sales now come from existing buyers.  But we also see that there is tremendous opportunity for customers to use NexentaStor more.

And here is where the community comes in.  While we continue to get better partners and continue to hire many more people and to share in these groups the best practices about business continuity and NexentaStor for example I also believe that events like the upcoming OpenStorage summit in Palo Alto are absolutely invaluable for us all to share notes *live* about what works, and what would be really cool, and how to fix whatever is broken.   It is our growing community of users and, yes, survey respondents that are allowing OpenStorage to continue to accelerate while improving overall total product quality.

So, if you want to become a Certified NexentaStor Engineer, or you just want to attend some of the sessions and hear Bill Moore and Garrett D’Amore discuss the future of ZFS and Illumos, please join us at the OpenStorage summit in late October.  Note that there is a $100 fee to cover our direct expenses to attend the summit.  Learn more here.

And please keep the comments coming!

Why Supermicro & NexentaStor > 3PAR

August 23rd, 2010 by epowell

Today we announced a strategic partnership with a company that has revolutionized the market for industry standard servers and storage components, Supermicro.  This announcement will prove to be more significant to the storage industry than the bidding war over 3PAR.

I have a lot of respect for 3PAR’s software, which turns industry standard hardware into a SAN with many ZFS like capabilities.

However, today’s bidding war over 3PAR just confirms:

- Storage is a massive, massive market - now some 42% of IT spending

- Storage is sticky - thanks to a) the physics of moving data around and b) the proprietary technologies of legacy vendors, it is extremely hard to shift storage vendors

- Storage is strategic - not just because of the money and the lock in (which might be enough) but also because storage enables or gets in the way of all significant IT initiatives including, most importantly, virtualization

What the amounts being thrown around for 3PAR do not take into account is that storage is being commoditized.  The hardware went first — all the hardware is basically the same  whether you buy it from a Nexenta partner or via your legacy array vendor.  And now the channel is being trained and provided with tightly integrated solutions that enables the much larger commodity server channel to compete with the storage market with superior total solutions.

As Wally Lauw, VP of Sales at Supermicro puts it in an article on the partnership we announced today:

“Our channel partners can now offer another complete, certified Supermicro SBB storage solutions that deliver unmatched performance, availability and features.”

In other words, storage is being commoditized now not just because of price but also because of features, features, features.  See for example the results of a recent survey of NexentaStor paid customers:
features-or-priceAs our VP of Sales puts it - you give up nothing by going with OpenStorage and NexentaStor; you gain built in multi-level data integrity, the only solution in the industry with a single view into all the major virtualization vendors, inline dedupe and compression with on the box virus scan, and, as we emphasize today with our announcement of the relationship with Supermicro, an unmatched breadth and depth in the channel.

As always, comments welcome.  And congratulations to the 3PAR team.

OpenSolaris no more and Nexenta?

August 13th, 2010 by epowell

It appears that the rumors may be true and that Oracle may have decided to move towards a more closed model for the development of Solaris.  You can see a blog post with the leaked internal memo here:

http://sstallion.blogspot.com/2010/08/opensolaris-is-dead.html

If so, what does this mean for Nexenta?

Well, for NexentaStor customers and partners nothing will change.  We’ve been planning for this contingency for a long time.  We  have the team to continue to support customers and partners and to continue our development.  We look forward to picking up the appropriate pieces of Solaris when they are made available with Solaris 11 as well.

The leaked memo does state that Oracle will open source the CDDL components — however they’ll only do so when they release their Solaris commercial releases and not before.

We are already seeing hundreds of new customers that are experienced with OpenSolaris for storage - and we welcome these customers with open arms.  NexentaStor can address your storage needs and we look forward to proving this to you every day.

Last but certainly not least, we continue to feel that we’re on the same side as Oracle in the overall battle for openness and choice in enterprise storage.  Without their early work on ZFS there is no way that we could have achieved the “take off” we’re experiencing.   And, by both existing in the market we give customers the freedom from vendor lock-in they clearly demand; you can migrate from NexentaStor to an Oracle ZFS based solution and back in hours, as opposed to the months or quarters it takes to move off a legacy array.  We continue to value that joint value proposition in the market and certainly respect the world-class engineering of ZFS and related software.

OpenStorage call for papers is, well, open

August 10th, 2010 by epowell

Calling all OpenStorage enthusiastic experts, please consider presenting a talk at the OpenStorage summit this October25th-27th in Palo Alto.

You’ll be joining a fantastic initial list of speakers including Bill Moore, co-creator of ZFS; experts from various hardware and software partners including Oracle and Joyent are expected to speak as well.

What would be a good topic?

The intended audience will include storage administrators and CTOs as well as others completing training for their CNE (Certified Nexenta Engineer), so we expect talks that are technical and raise awareness about the advanced capabilities of OpenStorage.

For example:

  • Architectural details behind storage features such as de-duplication or encryption
  • Advances in OpenStorage such as new migration or replication features
  • Features supporting large scale-out
  • Performance tuning
  • Deploying storage for High availability
  • Case studies from customers with interesting deployments of OpenStorage

I’m meeting this week, for example, a partner from Asia deploying NexentaStor as the basis of a large cloud roll out.  The architecture of this roll out I believe could be quite interesting to attendees so I’m going to see if they want to submit a proposal.  The idea would be to focus on the technology and the overall solution; in other words, the discussions will *not* be NexentaStor or other OpenStorage vendor marketing pitches.

This is a time to share best practices with your peers.  Even over beers….

Please send a short email with a bullet point out line of your ~45 minute discussion to: summit2010 at nexenta.com.

Decisions will be made by an informal committee from Nexenta and others active in transforming the enterprise storage industry.  Apparently they need all proposals by the end of August at the latest.  Feel free to suggest an initial idea and then they will work with you.

To learn more about the Summit you can visit the registration page here:

http://nexenta-summit2010.eventbrite.com/

Please feel free to add comments and questions below as well!


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