Could NetApp's purchase of SolidFire see the end of ONTAP? NetApp has finally bitten the bullet and bought an AFA vendor, plumping for the technology-driven SolidFire as opposed to some of the marketing-driven competitors in the space. At less than a billion dollars, it appears to be a very good deal for NetApp and perhaps with an ever-decreasing number of suitors, it is a good deal …
SolidFire's Element OS is not designed to manage hard drives, only flash.
There will still be a place for hard drive based storage for the foreseeable future, this includes NAS storage.
NetApp E-Series/SANtricity can manage hard drives, but is not a NAS platform.
ONTAP is over 20 Years Old! It must be replaced!
NetApp screwed up ONTAP by merging it with Spinnaker OS and completely rewriting it and making it incompatible with ONTAP 7G! ONTAP 8 is only 5 years old. They should dump it and go back to the old ONTAP 7!
Which of the above two statements are true? They both can't be.
The truth is Clustered Data ONTAP 8 is a completely rewritten storage operating system, and is as new and as fresh and as innovative as anything produced by a storage start-up in the last 10 years. It is ideally suited for hard drive and hybrid based unified storage. It also has been optimized for flash based caching since its inception, and because it builds on many of the same technologies used by all flash array vendors (log-structured file systems, NV-RAM, RAID-6, etc.) it is very well suited for all-flash purposes. The same logic holds true for other hybrid storage players like Tegile and Tintri. One has to dig pretty deep to find the differences between clustered Data ONTAP 8 and Pure Storage Purity, EMC XtremIO XIOS, and Kaminario SPEAR. Or Tegile IntelliFlash or TintriOS or Nimble OS. Yes, there are differences, but they are small, subtle, and more indicative of different ways of solving small problems than huge architectural differences.
That is probably why NetApp bought SolidFire and not Pure or Kaminario. SolidFire is a sufficiently different architecture, and has had the most success in markets where NetApp's current all-flash offerings have not had as much success (service providers, commercial).
Ontap 8 is new and fresh and innovative? Is this George Kurian? You're supposed to disclose before you begin a rant like this.
Only small and subtle differences between NetApp CDOT and Xtremio or Kaminario? OK now you've just told everyone you're completely ignorant as to how these architectures are radically different from each other and that you should not be taken seriously.
The only thing you said with any truth was that Solidfire is different from Ontap, and it fills a gap that NetApp has in their offerings, which is for a viable all flash offering that can actually scale, something they don't remotely have. If they can somehow get Santricity, ONTAP, and Element to be managed/play well together, that would be great. Historically they have not been able to integrate acquired technologies either quickly or elegantly. It looks like a good play for NetApp I think. We'll see how their execution goes.
There is simply no way NetApp could and would have rewritten Data ONTAP entirely. The risk for introducing 100% new code into stuff that has already been battle tested is so high, to not even think about. In addition, if 90% of the features are the same between versions, what benefit would a rewrite get?
ONTAP 8 is not "fresh"; it's an evolved operating system with issues and benefits just like anything else that's been around for 20+ years. It still works in the same way, with legacy scale out (node pairs) and lack of scalability for FC over NAS. The issue is that is was never designed for flash and has features retro-fitted into it to make flash work. Remember at one stage NetApp claimed flash was only needed for caching and not as a tier.
SolidFire's SF series takes an approach that ONTAP can never do - proper scale-out (not node pairs) that can actively serve all data, not just act as a failover target. This fits the service provider niche that NetApp would love to be in, and have started to push with features like Cloud ONTAP.
I actually think NetApp should be applauded for taking a step into introduce new decent technology to the portfolio (not like the half-based EF series). The challenge will be whether the ONTAP bigots within the company can live with another platform or try to kill it off like that usually do. I have my fingers crossed for the former rather than the latter approach.
NetApp's problem is that people just want to pay about 1/10th of their NetApp costs for file storage... and can with scale out and cluster file servers. It is, as someone mentioned below, similar to Sun Microsystems pushing new features in Solaris when the problem was that they were competing again zero license cost Linux. You can't feature your way out of a price war. NetApp needs a new business model because people paying large license fees for file storage isn't a winner.
Despite the self marketing Pure's blog does get one thing right, Netapp's flash strategy has been all over the map for years.
1. PAM, Flashcache & Tiering
2. EF Series
3. FlashRay
4. All Flash FAS
5. SolidFire
With FlashRay dead that still leaves at least four competing solutions, EF & SolidFIre based on different architectures to each other and FAS and AFF also in the mix it's going to be confusing for Netapp sales and Customers alike. Unless of course Netapp give up and go for the time honored and lazy route of just sticking a Vseries on the front end.....
Time will tell, but looks like a good move. Lot of sniping going on for having multiple flash offerings post integration and the failure of Flashray. All successful companies have failed products, it's how you recover and refocus. (New Coke anyone?) Funny we never hear that about other vendors having overlapping offerings (and actually competing internally).
No way. NTAP FAS sales legions will not care about solidfire and they will not sell it. Also, the file portion of the datacenter is quite segregated from the block portion. Different applications, different end users, different budget, different customers for NTAP. NTAP like EMC is old and clunky and slow and apathetic and will only start hucking AFA 3 years from now when they absolutely have to. Until then it's FAS with disk and some SSD. The end
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@ storage ed.
Totally.
I was at NetCrap when they bought Engenio and the sales teams didnt know what it was and how to sell it. The deal sizes were smaller and getting pre-sales help was a nightmare - only one guy in EMEA for some time and despite his best efforts, the sales didnt materialise. The OEM stuff withered on the vine as competitors didnt want NetApp in their accounts.
I would expect that Solidfire will be different as I guess they will have their own sales teams and technical resources (if they dont leave because they already left NotApp once :) ) but dont expect the FAS die hards to start selling it quickly.
And the Linux 4.x kernel is not the Linux 1.x kernel.
And Solaris 2.x was not SunOS 4.x.
And Mac OS X is not MacOS 9.
For most established software, be it server operating systems or storage array software, there is significant turnover of the code. Entire sections and modules are regularly rewritten.
ONTAP was completely rearchitected to take Spinnaker OS features into account. "D-Blade", "N-Blade", etc., these Data ONTAP C-Mode software constructs are from Spinnaker OS, not legacy Data ONTAP.
WAFL? If Data ONTAP C-Mode WAFL is unchanged from Data ONTAP 7-Mode WAFL, then you could just mount a 7G aggregate in C-Mode and serve data from it, but you can't. Something is different. Something changed. Something was rewritten.
What about SnapMirror in C-Mode vs. SnapMirror in 7-Mode? If it is the same thing, if it has not been rewritten, why is C-Mode so different? And if NetApp is just repackaging the same thing over and over, where did Q-Tree SnapMirror go? And what is this new version of SnapMirror I hear about in ONTAP 8.3?
I have heard from multiple software houses (OS, application, and storage software) that if you go back 3 major releases of a software platform, there is almost no common code--in other words, every three iterations results in effectively a complete rewrite--net new code. It is also common for certain modules to be rewritten with a new release, while others are simply maintained, only to be rewritten in the next major release. If the 3-release rule holds true to NetApp and C-Mode, then C-Mode 8.3 has been completely rewritten from C-Mode 8.0. That is probably correct. The same probably holds true for Windows 2012 and Windows 2000.
The reason legacy systems are legacy systems is because they require legacy compatibility. They make conscious decisions not to incorporate certain things that would break compatibility. It is not because their developers are not smart enough to come up with new ideas, or because their company's engineering leadership is not interested in new ideas. How many have had to create a custom Windows 2003 ISO image for a late model Intel server? Yeah, compatibility matters.
Second movers have second mover advantage. A startup, with no legacy to be compatible with, can make changes at the start, based on the examples of errors of others. But the luxury of no legacy is ephemeral.
As for WAFL, WAFL effectively is a Log-Structured File System. It came into being in the early 1990s at the same time as the major academic research into LSFSs was going on. Then NetApp had the second mover advantage over Auspex, which was limited in part due to its Berkley UNIX file system.
Today, all of the major AFAs and hybrid arrays use LSFSs: Nimble, Tintri, Pure, XtremIO, Kaminario, etc. LSFSs are the only way to effectively manage wear on NAND flash, to the point more FTLs on SSDs are also LSFS based. Are these later LSFS implementations slightly better? Sure. Does it provide significant differentiation and customer value? Doubtful.
For these AFAs, it really comes down to single container vs. multiple container architectures, global vs. non-global duplication, and supported protocols. And NetApp and HPE figured out they both have pretty good hybrid storage platforms that can be competitive with net-new start-up AFAs. And some of those net-new designs are already hitting architectural walls. And to break through those walls may require significant change, and disruption to their legacy. XtremIO already encountered this with the 3.0 software release.
There is very little radical improvement in storage. Every vendor offers sub millisecond response times. Every vendor offers some level of storage efficiency. Every vendor has good NAND wear leveling. The differentiation which was there two years ago has been commoditized.
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