NetApp Ends SnapMirror for Open Systems

NetApp will discontinue its SnapMirror for Open Systems (SMOS) product line and development. SMOS is just one of NetApp’s software products for heterogeneous data replication and recovery. NetApp originally acquired the product through its acquisition of Topio, an Israeli-based company, in December 2006. The NetApp facility in Haifa, Israel, currently employs 51 people and will be closed as of January 15, 2009. NetApp has not made final employment decisions regarding our employees in Haifa.

"Our decision to terminate SMOS product development was based on customer priorities and actual purchase histories. The market for replication products for disaster recovery purposes is dominated by homogeneous, rather than multivendor, solutions. Our ‘any-to-any’ solution with SMOS was never adopted by customers in the way we anticipated," stated the company.

Other versions of SnapMirror remain fully supported and still have development teams and road maps intact. NetApp has additional products and technologies-for both primary and secondary storage environments-to deliver ‘any-to-NetApp’ data protection solutions in storage management, backup, archiving, and security. We see strong customer interest in these business segments within the enterprise storage market and remain committed to these investments.

NetApp is also committed to supporting existing customers who have deployed SMOS. We are in the process of issuing an End of Availability (EOA) announcement that communicates to customers that they will have three years of maintenance and technical support for their SMOS purchases.

Comments

Formerly Sanpro Systems, born in 2001 and based in Santa Clara, CA with R&D in Haifa, Israel, start-up Topio received $21 million in financial funding before being acquired by NetApp for $160 million in December 2006.

NetApp has not acquired a lot of companies since its inception - it's not like voracious EMC -, but was not generally successful in its choices. The engineers at Spinnaker Networks, a company acquired for $306 million in 2003, were really late to integrate their product into NetApp environment. Encyption is mainly handled by chips rather than by an appliance like the product that NetApp got in 2005 for $272 million. Alacritus, for only $11 million in 2005, was a better hoice.