INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: NetApp Federal Systems
Mark Weber
Vice President
NetApp Federal Systems
Q: What types of products and services are you offering to military and other government customers?
A: We’re a data management company. We provide hardware and software to manage your data—a lot of storage products and the software that manages that data in storage. Those are the primary products we offer, but we’re also into the security environment as well, with the number-one encryption product for data at rest. So if you need to encrypt data on a disk or on tape, we have that as well, through a product called Decru.
Q: Your company is a leader in unified storage solutions for today’s dataintensive enterprise. What unique benefits does this role provide your customers in comparison with other companies in the field?
A: In the data management storage world, there are different typologies that people use—the SAN environment, the NAS environment and the iSCSI environment. They’re all different ways to connect your systems to storage. Most people have a different architecture and product line for each of those different typologies. But NetApp has one product, and you can put any of those different typologies on the same product. You don’t have to have multiple operating systems or multiple connections. In fact, you can have SAN, NAS and iSCSI all on the exact same product at the same time. The big advantage is consolidation, plus you only have to learn one architecture, and then deploy it in different environments depending on which typology is best. The unified storage environment allows you to do that, rather than pick three different products from another vendor.
Q: How are you working to strengthen the security of your storage solutions?
A: We have a lot of security features and functions that we layer onto our standard software and storage environment. Outside of that, however, we also offer the Decru product line, which has all of the major government certifications, including Common Criteria and FIPS 140 encryption certifications. You can encrypt your data on the storage, or you can encrypt your data going onto tapes. Encryption of your data is almost a must in our environment these days. Decru has almost an 80 percent market share right now. It’s enterprise encryption, one of the major benefits of which is the key-management software, managing all the keys that go with encryption. That’s the hard part, and that’s what we do best.
Q: How is Network Appliance currently working with the military?
A: We cover the breadth. We’re about one-third each for military, intelligence and civilian, so our products are not focused on just one piece of the military. We look at it more as different applications that the government wants. So we do a lot of Microsoft applications and Oracle applications, and a lot of the large archives that the government does to keep data, whether in the intelligence world or the civilian agency world. We’re looking at more at the apps side rather than specific projects.
Q: Are you currently developing new products and services relevant to military and government customers that you hope to bring to the market in the future?
A: We’re always introducing new products on an ongoing basis. But some of the hottest products we have coming are for the military environment, and even on the civilian agency side. They deploy a lot of people to go out and do their job, whether it’s the State Department sending people to the embassies or the Marines going out to the edge. So one of the unique things we can do is that even in the data center, we now can scale all the way down to a small system that you can deploy in a tent in Iraq or put under an Internal Revenue Service agent’s arm, and it’s the exact same software that you use in the enterprise up in the data center. So the scalability of our product line, to be able to go all the way down to the deployable app and up to the big mission- critical app, and have the same environment, is where we’re headed and one of the big things we’re offering.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A: NetApp has taken the government environment and made it our number-one vertical market. We are totally focused on that, with a whole business unit devoted to calling on the federal government and their prime contractors. That makes it our numberone vertical across the whole company. So when you have that kind of focus, and people who understand how to sell into that environment and provide the right products, it’s a recipe for success, both for the government and for us. ♦
