NetApp announced earlier this year that it was planning on doing another acquisition following on their recent purchase of Bycast (policy based storage and management software).

This time, NetApp is doing yet another software acquisition of Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) as well as End to End (E2E) cross technology domain management and Storage or Systems Resource Analysis (SRA) startup Akorri which also builds on its past acquisition of SRA solution Onaro.

Is this a good move by NetApp?

Assuming they got a good price, yes, this has very potential for NetApp assuming they can assimilate the solution as well as articulate where it fits complimenting its other management tools including SANscreen (aka Onaro).

Is Akorii a good product?

Yes, most of the customers and var partners of Akorri that I talk to have great things to say and having looked into the technology, it has lots of good potential for NetApp. However, there is a common theme around Akorri that has been its high price, something that was also heard from Onaro customers before NetApp did that acquisition. If NetApp can leverage its direct as well as partner touch to reduce the cost of sale for Akorri as well as rationalize the pricing or at least better articulate the value proposition to make it a must have vs nice to have, they can do well.

The importance of E2E awareness of IT resources across different technology domains (or focus areas) is that you can not effectively manage what you do not have timely access or visibility into. Hence the theme of session being You cannot effectively manage what you do not know about in a timel.... I recently did a couple of Industry Trends and Perspectives webcast events around the topic and themes of End to End (E2E) awareness and cross domain (or technology) management insight for cloud, virtual and other abstracted as well as physical IT environments.

Nuff said for now

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and coming summer 2011 Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC)
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