NetApp Freshens What's OnTap

Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) has polished up its 10-year-old Data OnTap, the operating system that ships with all of its NAS filers. Among the additions are improved provisioning, enhanced snapshots, and wider hardware support (see NetApp Enhances Data OnTap).

But the new additions point to a key feature still missing.

Let's start at the top. NetApp's touting two key features for its OS, both available today:

FlexVol is built into Data OnTap, and FlexClone is licensed separately, with pricing starting at $6,000.

One analyst says the value of the new features depends on whether NetApp makes good on its claim that they won’t require additional computing resources. “The key here is they’re providing more layers of abstraction, but what will be the performance overhead?” Taneja Group senior analyst Alex Garbansky asks. “They say it will be negligible, but that needs to be tested.”NetApp also added hardware support for its gFiler NAS gateway. GFiler now supports Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) StorageWorks XP and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) DS4000 storage (former FastT). Previously announced support includes Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), IBM Shark, and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) storage.

Still missing from the list is hardware from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). NetApp says that’s EMC’s choice.

NetApp's clearly watching EMC over its shoulder, since the two companies together account for a majority of the NAS market. For one thing, the snapshot improvements make NetApp's software work more like EMC's TimeFinder.

One thing both vendors still lack, however, is global namespace technology, which lets users manage stored files as one big pool. Global namespace would support FlexVol’s volume management across multiple filers instead of just multiple spindles on one filer.

Despite this latest upgrade, NetApp is more than a year away from integrating global namespace into its operating system. Still, it does have its hands on the technology, thanks to its acquisition of Spinnaker Networks for $300 million last year (see NetApp Annexes Spinnaker and NetApp Maps NAS Path).When NetApp bought Spinnaker last November, the timetable was two years to full integration. But NetApp senior director of product management Chris Bennett says full integration remains a good year-and-a-half to two years away, as the Spinnaker engineering team in Pittsburgh and the NetApp team try to combine NetApp’s Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) file system with the Spinnaker architecture. One of the key challenges is that the Spinnaker OS only supports NFS, so CIFS support needs to be added.

In the meantime, NetApp will continue to license software from NuView Inc.

to provide global namespace, until it can provide it natively.

NuView, along with Acopia Networks Inc. and Panasas Inc., have beaten NetApp and EMC to the punch with global namespace. (See Kiwis Use ClarifyCRM, Panasas: Lab Rat No More, NuView Backs Up NetApp, and Acopia Ships Its Switch.)

There's another player, now, too: ONStor Inc. today announced its own NAS enhancements that include global namespace (see ONStor Enhances Virtual Server Intelligence).

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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