Manish Goel, executive VP of product operations, and other NetApp executives then went into a discussion on NetApp innovation and product strategy. The company views its first decade of innovation (the 1990s) as being about performance, such as in optimized file systems. The second decade (the 2000s) added an emphasis on efficiency as a basis of innovation, such as thin provisioning and deduplication. The new decade (2010s) adds a third point of emphasis on scale. NetApp intends to focus on maximizing the benefits of virtualized environments, as well as enabling a flexible, shared storage infrastructure at scale. While still focusing on performance, such as in the use of flash drives and on efficiency both from a cost and operational perspective, scale takes center stage.
NetApp believes that storage will evolve from shared virtualized storage and scale-out NAS today to a unified architecture at scale, which means the ability of unified storage (SAN plus NAS) to work effectively without having an upper boundary on performance or capacity. The company plans to extend its unified architecture approach with the release of Data ONTAP 8.1 in the near future.
Until its acquisition of Engenio, NetApp had only one storage OS to its credit--Data ONTAP. ONTAP 8.0.1 is now available, but this is really the stage that 8.1 will start to exploit in a major way the capabilities that are necessary for a unified architecture at scale. Note that this is the start of a 10-year innovation agenda that NetApp has planned, so the end goals are not going to be achieved with 8.1, although it is a strong start to the journey.
Now, NetApp was a pioneer in unified storage, but the company emphasized that its unified architecture will be about much more than mere protocols. Scaling will focus on three dimensions: performance, capacity and operations. Storage efficiency will continue advances in areas such as compression and thin provisioning. Cost/performance will deliver new ways to exploit technologies such as flash cache and SSD.
NetApp stresses a comprehensive program for data protection that it calls integrated data protection that includes strong snapshot technologies. Tying everything together is a strong focus on management and ecosystem integration, including unified management, secure multitenancy and support for multivendor virtualization solutions that would seem to be mandatory to facilitate customer acceptance in many IT environments.
Data ONTAP 8.1 expands system scalability to 24 nodes and a single name space. However circuitous a path NetApp followed, I don't know, but this provides the
capabilities that the company sought with its Spinnaker acquisition and surfaced briefly as GX. The key is that the capabilities are now in Data ONTAP 8.
NetApp has numerous objectives for its 10-year agenda, but two of them are “infinite and immortal.” Infinite in this sense does not mean the mathematically pure definition of infinity, but rather that scale becomes so large that there are no real size boundaries. Storage containers will be able to scale up, scale out and scale down to handle petabytes of data and billions of objects as necessary. In NetApp parlance, immortal simply means that workloads can be moved non-disruptively and in an operationally transparent manner, such as in migrating data in an old array to a new one. By nearly any measure, NetApp has an ambitious agenda, but its goals seem to be realistic.
