Jeff Steiner

I'd say on average on an ASF system, storage weight events.

are about 5% of the total wait events, meaning if you sold somebody the new AFF 9000 systems with the holographic storage crystals and all that, the best you could hope for is zero milliseconds of latency and their database would get 5% faster.

And the only way they're going to get faster is change the query logic.

Because they just flat out can't make use of the capabilities of the storage system.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that, but I think I'm going to have to learn.

Yeah, what we've done, especially in the database market, what we've given the market with these all-flash systems is way more than they are likely to need for the next, oh, I'd guess 18 months.

Given 18 months, two years or so, people are going to start coming up with business requirements and applications and databases that will actually be able to pull 500,000 sub-millisecond IOPS out of the database.

That's when they're going to come back to us and say, yes, I would like the new ONTAP model with the NVMe fabric interfaces and the 3D crosspoint drives.

The number one advice that I give to account teams, I do these little mini sales training things.

And sometimes when I'm doing an EBC session, I'll prep the account teams and I'll say, here's what you got to do when a customer says database.

Shut up about NetApp.

I do not want anyone to say Snapshot or FAS or AFF or anything for at least 45 minutes.

We just have to ask the customer, what do you want to do?

Yep.

If they try to talk about technology, avoid it.

Dodge the question.

We want to know as much detail about exactly what they want to accomplish and what they want to do and just question after question after question.

Then you come back and you hit them with the perfect solution for exactly what they asked for.

They will guide you and tell you what it is that you should be talking to them about.

And then when they get their first exposure to what NetApp can do, you've precisely targeted their needs.