NetApp, Inc. is an American hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has ranked in the
Fortune 500 from 2012–2021.
Founded in 1992
with an
IPO
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
in 1995,
NetApp offers cloud data services for management of applications and data both online and physically.
History
NetApp was founded in 1992 by
David Hitz
David Hitz is an American engineer. In 1992, he, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm founded NetApp, where he became an executive vice president.
A graduate of Deep Springs College, Hitz earned a BSE from Princeton University and went on to work as ...
, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm
as Network Appliance, Inc. At the time, its major competitor was
Auspex Systems
Auspex Systems was a computer data storage company founded in 1987 by Larry Boucher, who was previously CEO of Adaptec. It was headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
Auspex introduced the first network-attached storage (NAS) devices. After an ...
. In 1994, NetApp received venture capital funding from
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...
. It had its
initial public offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
in 1995. NetApp thrived in the
internet bubble
The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.
Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...
years of the mid 1990s to 2001, during which the company grew to $1 billion in annual revenue. After the bubble burst, NetApp's revenues quickly declined to $800 million in its fiscal year 2002. Since then, the company's revenue has steadily climbed.
In 2006, NetApp sold the NetCache product line to
Blue Coat Systems
__FORCETOC__
Blue Coat Systems, Inc., was a company that provided hardware, software, and services designed for cybersecurity and network management. In 2016, it was acquired by and folded into Symantec. In 2019 was, as part of Symantec Enterpris ...
.
In 2008, Network Appliance officially changed its legal name to NetApp, Inc., reflecting the nickname by which it was already well-known.
On June 1, 2015, Tom Georgens stepped down as CEO and was replaced by
George Kurian
George Kurian is an Indian-American business executive. He is the current chief executive officer and a member of the board of NetApp. Prior to this, he was the Executive Vice President of Product Operations at NetApp.
Early life and education
...
.
In May 2018 NetApp announced its first End to End NVMe array called All Flash FAS A800 with release of ONTAP 9.4 software. NetApp claims over 1.3 million IOPS at 500 microseconds per high-availability pair.
In January 2019 Dave Hitz announced retirement from NetApp.
Acquisitions
* 1997 - ''Internet Middleware'' (IMC) acquired for $10.5 million. IMC's web proxy caching software became the
NetCache product line (which was resold in 2006).
* 2004 - ''Spinnaker Networks'' acquired for $300 million. Technologies from Spinnaker integrated into Data ONTAP GX and first released in 2006, later Data ONTAP GX become Clustered Data
ONTAP
ONTAP or Data ONTAP or Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) or Data ONTAP 7-Mode is NetApp's proprietary operating system used in storage disk arrays such as NetApp FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. With the release of version 9.0, Net ...
* 2005 - ''Alacritus'' acquired for $11 million. The tape virtualization technology Alacritus brought to NetApp was integrated into the NetApp NearStore Virtual Tape Library (VTL) product line, introduced in 2006.
* 2005 - ''Decru'': Storage security systems and key management.
* 2006 - ''Topio'' acquired for $160 million. Software that helped replicate, recover, and protect data over any distance regardless of the underlying server or storage infrastructure. This technology became known as ReplicatorX (Open System SnapVault), and has since been abandoned.
* 2008 - ''Onaro'' acquired for $120 million. Storage service management software which helps customers manage storage more efficiently with guaranteed service levels for availability and performance. Onaro's SANscreen technology launched as such and probably later influencing NetApp OnCommand Insight.
* 2010 - ''Bycast'' acquired for $50 million. Technologies from Bycast gave birth to the
StorageGRID object storage product.
* 2011 - ''Akorri'' acquired for $60 million, allowing for cross-domain analysis and advanced analytics across data center infrastructures.
* 2011 - ''Engenio'' (LSI) acquired for $480 million. Engenio was the external storage systems business unit of the
LSI Corporation
LSI Logic Corporation, an American company founded in Milpitas, California, was a pioneer in the ASIC and EDA industries. It evolved over time to design and sell semiconductors and software that accelerated storage and networking in data center ...
. Launched as
NetApp E-Series product line
* 2012 - ''Cache IQ'': Development of NAS cache systems
* 2013 - ''IonGrid'': A technology developer that allows iOS devices to access users and internal business applications through a secure connection
* 2014 - ''SteelStore'': NetApp acquired
Riverbed Technology
Riverbed Technology is an American information technology company. Its products consist of software and hardware focused on Unified Observability, Network Visibility, End User Experience Management, network performance monitoring, application pe ...
's SteelStore line of data backup and protection products, which it later renamed as
AltaVault and then to Cloud Backup
* 2015 - ''SolidFire'': In December 2015 (closing in January 2016), NetApp acquired founded in 2009
flash storage
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use ...
vendor
SolidFire
NetApp, Inc. is an American hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 from 2012–2021. Founded in 1992 with an IPO in 1995, NetApp offers cloud data services ...
for $870 million.
* 2017 - ''Plexistor'': NetApp first announced the acquisition of a company and technology called Plexistor in May 2017. Technologies from Plexistor gave start for
MAX Data product
* 2017 - ''Greenqloud'' was acquired with its Qstack product. Greenqloud was a private startup company that created cloud services, orchestration and management platform for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.
* 2017 - ''Immersive Partner Solutions'', a
Littleton, Colorado
Littleton is a home rule municipality city located in Arapahoe, Douglas, and Jefferson counties, Colorado, United States. Littleton is the county seat of Arapahoe County and is a part of the Denver–Aurora–Lakewood, CO Metropolitan Stati ...
-based developer of software to validate multiple converged infrastructures through their lifecycles
* 2018 - ''StackPointCloud'': NetApp acquired StackPointCloud, a project for multi-cloud Kubernetes as-a-service and a contributor to the Kubernetes which started the
Kubernetes Service product
* 2019 - ''Cognigo'': Israeli AI-driven data compliance and security supplier
* 2020 - ''Talon'': Cloud Data Storage company enabling data consolidation and security for enterprises.
* 2020 - ''CloudJumper'': Cloud software in
VDI and remote desktop services
* 2020 - ''Spot'': handled compute management and cost optimization in the public clouds
* 2021 - ''CloudHawk.io'': AWS Cloud Security Posture.
* 2021 - ''CloudCheckr'': Cloud Optimization Platform.
* 2022 - ''Fylamynt'': CloudOps automation technology company.
* 2022 - ''Instaclustr'': open source database startup.
Competition
NetApp competes in the
computer data storage
Computer data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data (computing), data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers.
The central pro ...
hardware industry. In 2009, NetApp ranked second in
market capitalization
Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders.
Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by t ...
in its industry behind
EMC Corporation
Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud ...
, now Dell EMC, and ahead of
Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquart ...
,
Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...
,
Brocade,
Imation, and
Quantum. In total revenue of 2009, NetApp ranked behind EMC, Seagate, Western Digital, and ahead of Imation, Brocade,
Xyratex
Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarte ...
, and
Hutchinson Technology
Hutchinson Technology is a company that specializes in the design and manufacture of precision technologies. Hutchinson's primary products are suspension assemblies that hold magnetic read-write heads at microscopic distances above the disks in ...
. According to a 2014 IDC report, NetApp ranked second in the network storage industry "Big 5's list", behind EMC (Dell), and ahead of IBM, HP and Hitachi. According to Gartner's 2018 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, NetApp was named a leader, behind
Pure Storage
Pure Storage is an American publicly traded technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States. It develops all-flash data storage hardware and software products. Pure Storage was founded in 2009 and developed its product ...
Systems. In 2019,
Gartner
Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its client ...
named NetApp as #1 in Primary Storage.
Products
NetApp's OnCommand management software controls and automates data-storage. ActiveIQ comes to NetApp with the acquisition of SolidFire. ActiveIQ is SaaS portal with built-in monitoring, prediction, recommendations for optimizing configurations and performance for NetApp storage systems based on machine-learning capabilities and artificial intelligence. Later ONTAP Analytics and Telemetry Service (OATS) product, which can be installed in AWS cloud and on-premise, was renamed to Active IQ Performance Analytics Services (ActiveIQ PAS).
NetApp ONTAP-based Hardware Appliances
NetApp's FAS (Fabric-Attached Storage), AFF (All-Flash FAS), and ASA (All SAN Array) storage systems are the company's flagship products. Such products are made up of storage controllers, and one or more enclosures of hard disks, known as shelves. In entry-level systems, the drives may be physically located in the same chassis as storage controller(s).
In the early 1990s, NetApp's storage systems initially offered
NFS and
SMB protocols based on standard
local area network
A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...
s (LANs), whereas block storage consolidation required
storage area network
A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from ser ...
s (SANs) implemented with the
Fibre Channel (FC) protocol.
In 2002, in an attempt to increase market share, NetApp added block-storage access as well, supporting the Fibre Channel and
iSCSI
Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...
protocols. NetApp systems support Fibre Channel,
iSCSI
Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...
,
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. This allows Fibre Channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks (or higher speeds) while preserving the Fibre Channel ...
(FCoE) and the FC-NVMe protocol.
ONTAP
Many of NetApp's products use the company's proprietary
ONTAP
ONTAP or Data ONTAP or Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) or Data ONTAP 7-Mode is NetApp's proprietary operating system used in storage disk arrays such as NetApp FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. With the release of version 9.0, Net ...
data management operating system, under continuous development since 1992 which includes code from Berkeley Net/2
BSD Unix, Spinnaker Networks technology and other operating systems.
[
] There are three
ONTAP platforms: FAS/AFF systems, software on commodity servers (
ONTAP Select) as virtual machine or in the cloud (
Cloud Volumes ONTAP). All ONTAP systems are using
WAFL file systems which provide basis for snapshots and other snapshot-based and data protection technologies. Key IP from ONTAP is also used in NetApp Astra, a newer data management-as-a-service system built for
Kubernetes
Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...
.
Cloud Backup
Previously known as Riverbed SteelStor before its acquisition by NetApp, this product was later renamed to AltaVault and then to Cloud Backup. Cloud Backup was initially available in three forms: as a hardware appliance, virtual appliance, and cloud appliance. Later NetApp announced the end of sale for hardware and virtual appliances. Data placed on NAS share on Cloud Backup deduplicated, compressed, encrypted and transferred with Object Protocols to object storage systems like
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its ...
,
Azure Blob Storage or StorageGRID; thus Cloud Backup appears as a transparent gateway for archiving data to a private or public cloud.
NetApp HCI
NetApp
Hyper-converged infrastructure
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined IT infrastructure that virtualizes all of the elements of conventional " hardware-defined" systems. HCI includes, at a minimum, virtualized computing (a hypervisor), software-defined ...
(HCI) or sometimes referred by NetApp as Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, NetApp HCI is based on commodity blade and rack servers, NetApp Element software and
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere (formerly VMware Infrastructure 4) is VMware's cloud computing virtualization platform.
It includes an updated vCenter Configuration Manager, as well as vCenter Application Discovery Manager, and the ability of vMotion to move m ...
. NetApp HCI includes a web-based GUI with installation wizard called NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) for configuring vCenter,
IP address
An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...
es, login and password, and storage nodes. NetApp HCI is different from conventional HCI designs because it has dedicated storage nodes, while other HCI systems like
Dell EMC
Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud c ...
VxRail or
vSAN
A virtual storage area network (virtual SAN, VSAN or vSAN) is a logical representation of a physical storage area network (SAN). A VSAN abstracts the storage-related operations from the physical storage layer, and provides shared storage access to ...
do not have dedicated storage nodes and utilize disk drives installed in each server. Dedicated storage nodes allow the cluster to grow or decrease storage capacity and performance separately from compute nodes. Minimum NetApp HCI configuration requires two compute blade server nodes and additionally, Element software requires a minimum of 4 storage nodes but is available to customers as four physical storage nodes or two physical storage nodes and two nodes as a virtual machine playing witness role on compute nodes.
2U HCI Chassis with four half-width blade servers
Each storage node drive set consists of 6 SSD drives directly connected to a dedicated storage node and installed in front of the blade chassis. Each storage and compute blade nodes have
25 Gigabit Ethernet ports which could be used as 10Gbit/s ports as well as dedicated 1Gb ports for management purposes. Network switches were not included, and in NetApp HCI with Element software release 11 NetApp announced H-Series Switch as part of HCI, so all hardware components must be bought from NetApp.
ONTAP Select available as
SDS on NetApp HCI for customers interested in NAS protocols. The self-service portal allows automating common provisioning and management tasks without involving the IT team. NetApp Kuberneties Service will support NetApp HCI with the acquisition of Stackpoint. NetApp SolidFire storage and NetApp HCI can be expanded & mixed in a single cluster. At the NetApp Insight 2018 conference in Las Vegas NetApp presented two new compute nodes: H410C and H610C, where H610C includes additional GPU cards which can be used in VDI environments. Starting with Element OS version 11, automatically detected and enabled by default with the upgrade, HCI has ''Protection Domains'' functionality to provide resiliency into HCI chassis. In the case of maintenance or chassis failure, helix algorithm spans data blocks workload will automatically fail-over to another operational chassis.
SolidFire
SolidFire storage system uses OS called NetApp Element Software (formally SolidFire Element OS) based on
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
and designed for SSDs and scale-out architecture with the ability to expand up to 100 nodes and provide access to data through SAN protocols
iSCSI
Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...
natively and
Fiber Channel with two gateway nodes. Element OS provides a REST-based API for storage automation, configuration, management, and consumption. SF node H610S has 12 2.5" NVMe SSD drives and can install only Element version 10.4, while previous models have 10 SSD drives. Element SW version 11, will not support FC. SolidFire uses iSCSI login redirection to distribute reads and writes across the cluster using helix algorithm. This architecture does not have disk shelves like traditional storage systems and expands with adding nodes to the cluster. Each node has pre-installed SSD drives. Each node can have only one type of SSD drives with the same capacity. Each SolidFire cluster can have a mix of different node models & generations. Element X uses the replication factor of 2, where blocks of data spread across the cluster which has no performance impact but require more space in contrary to Erasure Coding technology. Such architecture allows users to expand performance and capacity separately as needed. Also, SolidFire has the ability to set three types of QoS for its
LUNs: minimum, maximum and burst. Burst is used as credits which were not used by the LUN while it was not received its maximums. Element X available as software-only on commodity servers. SolidFire systems using
S3 protocol could backup data to an
Object storage
Object storage (also known as object-based storage) is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data a ...
systems like StorageGRID. SolidFire could replicate data with SnapMirror protocol to ONTAP systems and starting with Element OS 11 to Cloud Volumes ONTAP. VEEAM backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 will implement seamless integration with NetApp HCI and Solidfire provide application consistent storage snapshot capabilities, Instant VM Recovery, and Single Item Restore for some applications. CommVault Simpana also provides application-consistent storage snapshot capability for NetApp HCI and Solidfire. All HCI configurations require at least 4 10/25 Gbit/s ports for connections until Element OS 11, where two ports are enough.
StorageGRID
StorageGRID is a software-defined storage system which provides access to data via object IP-based protocols like
S3 and
OpenStack Swift
OpenStack is a free software, free, open-source software, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as Cloud computing#Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds w ...
. It is available in the form of hardware or as software. A node in a StorageGRID cluster is an appliance, virtual machine or docker container. StorageGRID is a geo-dispersed namespace clustered storage system, also known as "the grid", with an ability to make and store multiple copies (replicas) of objects (also known as Replication Factor) or in
Erasure Coding
In coding theory, an erasure code is a forward error correction (FEC) code under the assumption of bit erasures (rather than bit errors), which transforms a message of ''k'' symbols into a longer message (code word) with ''n'' symbols such that th ...
(EC) manner among cluster storage nodes with object granularity based on configured policies for data availability and durability purposes. StorageGRID stores metadata separately from the objects and allows users to configure Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) policies on a per-object level to automatically satisfy and confirm changes in the cluster once changes introduced to the cluster like the cost of network usage, storage media usage changes a node was added or removed, etc. ONTAP, Cloud Backup, SANtricity, and Element X can replicate data to StorageGRID systems. SG6060 is optimized for high transactional throughput, MA, AI, and FabricPool.
StorageGRID on NetApp HCI
Solution Deployment of StorageGRID on NetApp HCI can be deployed in three forms: Fully contained; High performance and scale; NetApp HCI and StorageGRID appliance.
E-Series
Previously known as LSI Engenio RDAC after NetApp acquisition the product renamed to NetApp E-Series. It is a general-purpose enterprise storage system with two controllers for SAN protocols such as
Fibre Channel,
iSCSI
Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...
,
SAS and
InfiniBand
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...
(includes SRP, iSER, and NVMe over Fabrics protocol). NetApp E-Series platform uses proprietary OS SANtricity and proprietary
RAID
Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to:
Attack
* Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground
* Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business
* Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...
called Dynamic Disk Pool (DDP) alongside traditional RAIDs like RAID 10, RAID 6, RAID 5, etc. In DDP pool each D-Stripe works similar to traditional
RAID-4 and
RAID-6 but on block level instead of entire disk level, therefore, have no dedicated parity drives. DDP compare to traditional RAID groups restores data from lost disk drive to multiple drives which provide a few times faster reconstruction time while traditional RAIDs restores lost disk drive to a dedicated parity drive. Starting with SANtricity 11.50 E-Series systems EF570 and E5700 support
NVMe
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The ...
over Ethernet (
RoCEv2) with 100Gbit/s Ethernet ports and NVMe over InfiniBand. Starting with EF600 systems are end-to-end NVMe and capable of NVMe/FC in addition to NVMe/RoCE & NVMe/InfiniBand. Sync and async mirroring are supported with SANtricity 11.50. SANtricity Unified Manager is a web-based manager that supports up to 500 EF/E-Series arrays and supports LDAP, RBAC, CA & SSL for authorization & authentication. In August 2019 NetApp announced E600 with support for NVMe/IB, NVMe/RoCE, NVMe/FC protocols, up to 44GBps of bandwidth and full-function embedded REST API.
Converged Infrastructure
FlexPod, nFlex and ONTAP AI are commercial names for
Converged Infrastructure (CI). Converged Infrastructures are joint products of a few vendors and consists from 3 main hardware components: computing servers, switches (in some cases switches are not necessary) and NetApp storage systems:
* FlexPod based on
Cisco Servers and
Cisco Nexus switches
The Cisco Nexus series switches are modular and fixed port network switches designed for the data center. Cisco Systems introduced the Nexus Series of switches on January 28, 2008. The first chassis in the Nexus 7000 family is a 10-slot chassis ...
* nFlex based on
Fujitsu Servers with
Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks is an American networking company based in San Jose, California. Extreme Networks designs, develops, and manufactures wired and wireless network infrastructure equipment and develops the software for network management, policy, a ...
switching
* ONTAP AI using
NVIDIA
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
supercomputers with Melanox or Cisco Nexus switches.
Converged Infrastructures have tested and validated design configurations from vendors available to end users and typically include popular infrastructure software like
Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), Red Hat OpenStack Platform,
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere (formerly VMware Infrastructure 4) is VMware's cloud computing virtualization platform.
It includes an updated vCenter Configuration Manager, as well as vCenter Application Discovery Manager, and the ability of vMotion to move m ...
,
Microsoft Servers
Microsoft Servers (previously called Windows Server System) is a discontinued brand that encompasses Microsoft software products for server computers. This includes the Windows Server editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well a ...
and
Hyper-V
Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded W ...
,
SQL,
Exchange
Exchange may refer to:
Physics
*Gas exchange is the movement of oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules from a region of higher concentration to a region of lower concentration. Places United States
* Exchange, Indiana, an unincorporated community
* ...
,
Oracle VM
An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination.
Description
The word ...
and
Oracle DB,
Citrix Xen,
KVM,
OpenStack
OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pl ...
,
SAP HANA
SAP HANA (HochleistungsANalyseAnwendung or High-performance ANalytic Application) is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP SE. Its primary function as the software running a databa ...
etc. and might include self-service portals
PaaS
Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...
or
IaaS
The first major provider of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was Amazon in 2008. IaaS is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, net ...
like
Cisco UCS Director (UCSD) or others. FlexPod, nFlex and ONTAP AI allows an end user to modify validated design and add or remove some of the components of the Converged Infrastructure while not all of the other Converged Infrastructures from competitors allows modification.
FlexPod
There are few FlexPod types: FlexPod Datacenter, FlexPod Select, FlexPod Express (Small, Medium, Large and UCS-managed), and FlexPod SF.
FlexPod Datacenter usually uses Nexus switches like 5000, 7000 & 9000; Cisco UCS Blade Servers; Mid-Range or High-End NetApp FAS or AFF systems. FlexPod Select often used with
BigData
Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...
framework software like Hortonworks, Cloudera, or more recently, Confluent. FlexPod SF has in its architecture Nexus 9000 switches, Cisco UCS Blade servers and NetApp SolidFire storage based on Cisco UCS rack servers. Cisco UCS Director used as the orchestrator for FlexPod for a self-service portal, workflow automation and billing platform to build PaaS & IaaS. FlexPod systems supported under the cooperative center of competence.
NetApp ''Converged Systems Advisor'' (CSA) is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that consists of an on-premises agent and a cloud-based portal.
Multi-Pod is a FlexPod Datacenter solution with a FAS or AFF system leveraging
MetroCluster technology for stretching storage system between two sites. NetApp and Cisco looking to incorporate
NetApp MAX Data product into FlexPod solutions once persistent memory technology will be available in UCS servers.
FlexPod Datacenter has the biggest variety of designed and validated by Cisco and NetApp architectures and applications including:
* Microsoft:
SQL, Exchange,
SharePoint
SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and its usage v ...
* Hypervisors:
Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere,
Citrix
Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologi ...
XenServer
Xen (pronounced ) is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was
originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory a ...
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack, Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp, Docker Datacenter for Container Management
* IBM Cloud Private, Cisco Hybrid Cloud with Cisco CloudCenter, Microsoft Private Cloud, Citrix CloudPlatform, Apprenda PaaS
* SAP, Oracle Database, Oracle RAC on Oracle Linux, Oracle RAC on Oracle VM
* 3D Graphics Visualization with Citrix and NVIDIA GPU. FlexPod Datacenter for AI leveraging UCS servers with NVIDIA GPU.
* Epic EHR, MEDITECH EHR
FlexPod types:
* FlexPod Express (Small, Medium, Large and UCS-managed)
* FlexPod Datacenter
* FlexPod SF
* FlexPod Select
ONTAP AI
Converged infrastructure solution based on Cisco Nexus 3000 or Mellanox Spectrum switches with 100Gbit/s ports, NetApp AFF storage systems,
Nvidia DGX supercomputer servers. DGX servers interconnected with each other over
RDMA over RoCE, and developed for
Deep Learning based on Docker containers with NetApp Docker Plugin Trident. DGX servers connected to the storage with Ethernet connection and consume space over NFS protocol. With SnapMirror ONTAP AI solution can deliver data between edge computing, on-prem & the cloud as part of Data Fabric vision. ONTAP AI tested & validated for use with NFS &
FlexGroup technologies. Combined technical support provided to the customers to all the architecture components.
OnCommand Insight
OnCommand Insight (OCI) is data center management software, capacity management, infrastructure analytics, centralized view into historical trends to forecast performance and capacity requirements and workload placement. OCI works with all NetApp storage systems and with competitor storage systems and in public cloud. Licensed server-based software.
Memory Accelerated Data
NetApp MAX Data for short, MAX Data is a proprietary
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
file system
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...
with auto-tiering from PMEM to SSD and data protection features for businesses. NetApp officially announced MAX Data's availability at NetApp Insight 2018 in October, supported by a number of server brands. MAX Data came from the acquisition of Plexistor in May 2017.
MAX Data consists of two tiers: Tier 1 and Tier 2, where cold data destaged to Tier 2 from Tier 1 or promoted from Tier 2 to Tier 1 when accessed, by MAX Data tiering algorithm, transparently to the applications. Currently, NetApp has recommended ratio for MAX Data as 1 to 25 for Tier 1 and Tier 2 respectively. MAX Data according to NetApp will have two modes: to use MAX Data as a POSIX-compatible (the internal name is M1FS) file system or as API memory extension. Usage of MAX Data as POSIX FS does not require application modifications while API memory extension requires applications to be modified in order to utilize this functionality. MAX Data installed on Linux hosts to utilize ultra-low latency with persistent memory such as the Optane DC persistent memory (Optane DCPMM), NVDIMM or DRAM (when persistence not needed, for example for testing purposes) memory for Tier 1 and a NetApp AFF storage system for Tier 2. Optane DCPMM is the Intel brand name of products that use 3D XPoint technology and supported starting with MAX Data version 1.3. MAX FS is a Persistent Memory-based Filesystem (PM-based FS) that doesn't require application modification but also can be a Direct Access enabled File system (DAX-enabled FS) for applications with optimization for Persistent Memory using SPDK. DAX is the mechanism that enables direct access to files stored in persistent memory arrays without the need to copy the data through the page cache. MAX data have a per-server license and do not depend on CPU, Memory or storage capacity. MAX Data has two different licensing tiers: Basic and Advanced.
Cloud Business
''Cloud Central'' is a web-based GUI interface that provides a multi-cloud interface based on Qstack for NetApp's cloud products like Cloud Volumes Service, Cloud Sync, Cloud Insights, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, SaaS Backup in multiple public cloud providers.
''Cloud Manager'' is a service for high-level management of ONTAP-based systems on-premise and in the cloud: CVO, CVS, ONTAP Select, FAS, and AFF. Cloud Manager allow setup SnapMirror data protection replication between systems through the GUI interface with drag-and-drop.
Cloud Volumes On-Prem
It is a storage system installed on-premises in a customer's data center and available to the customer as service. All work for updates & technical support provided by NetApp while the customer consumes space from the storage using web-based GUI or API and performs data backup and replication if needed.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Formally ONTAP Cloud.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO) is software-defined (SDS) version of
ONTAP
ONTAP or Data ONTAP or Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) or Data ONTAP 7-Mode is NetApp's proprietary operating system used in storage disk arrays such as NetApp FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. With the release of version 9.0, Net ...
available in some public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a virtual machine which is using commodity equipment and running ONTAP software as a service.
Cloud Volumes Service
Cloud Volumes Service is a service in Amazon AWS & Google Cloud - it is public cloud provider based on
NetApp All-Flash FAS systems and
ONTAP
ONTAP or Data ONTAP or Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) or Data ONTAP 7-Mode is NetApp's proprietary operating system used in storage disk arrays such as NetApp FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. With the release of version 9.0, Net ...
software, allowing for synchronizing data between cloud and on-premises NetApp systems.
NetApp Private Storage
NetApp Private Storage (NPS) is based on
Equinix
Equinix, Inc. is an American multinational company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that specializes in Internet connection and data centers. The company is a leader in global colocation data center market share, with 240 data centers ...
partner provided
colocation service in its data centers for NetApp Storage Systems with 10 Gbit/s direct connection to public cloud providers like Azure and AWS etc. NPS storage could be connected to a few cloud providers or on-premise infrastructure, thus in case of switching between clouds does not require data migration between them.
Astra
Astra is NetApp's
Kubernetes
Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...
cloud service for consistent application-consistent backups, Data Cloning, and data mobility across clouds and on-premises. Astra can deploy and maintain data-rich applications across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and on-premises datacenters, enabling easily backup and restoring data or migrating the applications from one Kubernetes cluster to another in a multi-cloud environment.
SaaS Backup
NetApp SaaS Backup (Previously Cloud Control) is back up and recovery service for
SaaS
Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
SaaS is con ...
Microsoft
Office 365
Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name ...
and
Salesforce
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...
which provide extended, granular and custom retention capabilities of backup and recovery process compare to native cloud backup. NetApp planning to extend SaaS Backup and recovery service for
Google Workspace
Google Workspace (formerly known as Google Apps and later G Suite) is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It consists of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Meet ...
(formerly G Suite and Google Apps for Work),
Slack and
ServiceNow
ServiceNow is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. Founded in 2003 by Fred Luddy, ServiceNow is listed on the ...
.
Cloud Sync
Cloud Sync is service for synchronizing any NAS storage system with another NAS storage, an Object Storage like Amazon S3 or NetApp Storage GRID using an object protocol.
Cloud Insights
Cloud Insights is an
SaaS
Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
SaaS is con ...
application for monitoring infrastructure application stack for customers consuming cloud resources and also build for the dynamic nature of microservices and web-scale infrastructures. Cloud Insights uses similar to OnCommand Insight front-end API but different technology on the back-end. Cloud Insights available as a preview and will have three editions: Free, Standard and Premium.
Cloud Secure
Cloud Secure is a SaaS security tool that identifies malicious data access and compromised users, in other words, user behavior analytics. Cloud Secure uses machine learning algorithms to identify unusual patterns, and can identify if users have been infected with
ransomware, and prevent them from encrypting the files.
Currently supported data repositories include NetApp Cloud Volumes, NetApp ONTAP, NetApp StorageGRID,
OneDrive
Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) is a file hosting service operated by Microsoft. First launched in August 2007, it enables registered users to share and synchronize their files. OneDrive also works as the storage backend of the web vers ...
, AWS, Google Suite, HPE, DELLEMC Isilon,
Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 ...
,
Box
A box (plural: boxes) is a container used for the storage or transportation of its contents. Most boxes have flat, parallel, rectangular sides. Boxes can be very small (like a matchbox) or very large (like a shipping box for furniture), and can ...
, @workspace and
Office 365
Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name ...
.
NDAS
NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS) provides data protection in the cloud
GUI
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
. This cloud service is located only in AWS but can be copied to other clouds. NDAS is for backup, data protection and disaster recovery purposes from ONTAP storage. ONTAP systems starting with ONTAP 9.5 have a built-in proxy application that converting NetApp snapshots with WAFL data & metadata into the S3 format unlike FabricPool technology, which stores only data in the object storage. NDAS is one of the Data Fabric manifestations.
Data Fabric
Often referred as to "Data Fabric Story," the variety of integrations between NetApp's products and data mobility is considered by NetApp to be its ''Data Fabric vision'' . Data Fabric defines the NetApp technology architecture for hybrid cloud and includes:
*SnapMirror replication from SolidFire to ONTAP
*SnapMirror replication from ONTAP to Cloud Backup
*FabricPool tiering feature for de-staging cold data from ONTAP to StorageGRID, Amazon S3 or Azure Blob
*Volume Encryption with FabricPool provide secure data storage and secure over the wire transfer of enterprise data in a cloud provider; SnapMirror between FAS, AFF, ONTAP Select and Cloud Volumes ONTAP
*Archiving and DR to public cloud
*CloudMirror feature in StorageGRID replicates from on-premise object storage to Amazon S3 storage and triggers some actions in AWS Cloud
*SolidFire backup to StorageGRID or Amazon S3
*Cloud Backup archiving to variety of object storage systems (including StorageGRID) or many cloud providers
*CloudSync is replication of NAS data to object format and back
*replication to Cloud Volumes Service;
*Data backup to on-premise storage from SaaS Backup
*SANtricity Cloud Connector for block-based backup, copy, and restore of E-Series volumes to an S3, NetApp Data Availability Services for data protection from ONTAP to cloud S3 storage with backup, DR & data mining capabilities, etc.
Software integrations
NetApp products could be integrated with a variety of software products, mostly for
ONTAP
ONTAP or Data ONTAP or Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) or Data ONTAP 7-Mode is NetApp's proprietary operating system used in storage disk arrays such as NetApp FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. With the release of version 9.0, Net ...
systems.
Automation
NetApp provides a variety of automation services directly to its products with HTTP protocol or through middle-ware software.
Docker
NetApp Trident software provides a persistent volume plugin for Docker containers with both orchestrators Kubernetes and Swarm and supports ONTAP, SolidFire, E-Series, Azure NetApp Files (ANF), Cloud Volumes and NetApp Kubernetes Service in Cloud.
Also, NetApp with
Cisco
Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...
sells CI architectures which incorporate the
Trident
A trident is a three- pronged spear. It is used for spear fishing and historically as a polearm.
The trident is the weapon of Poseidon, or Neptune, the God of the Sea in classical mythology. The trident may occasionally be held by other mari ...
plugin: FlexPod Datacenter with Docker Enterprise Edition and ONTAP AI.
CI/CD
NetApp Jenkins Framework provides integration with ONTAP storage for DevOps, accelerating development with automation operations like provisioning and data-set cloning for test and development and leverage ONTAP for version control, create and delete checkpoints etc. Jenkins also integrate with NetApp Service Level Manager software which provides RESTful API for guarantee level of storage performance. Apprenda and CloudBees integrate and accelerate DevOps through Docker persistent volume plugin and Jenkins Framework integration. Apprenda could be integrated with OpenStack running on top of FlexPod.
Backup and recovery
CommVault, Veeam and Veritas have integrations with ONTAP, SolidFire, Cloud Backup and E-Series leveraging storage capabilities like snapshots and cloning capabilities for testing backup copies and SnapMirror for Backup and Recovery (B&R), Disaster Recovery (DR) and Data Archiving for improving restore time and number of recovery points (see
RPO/RTO). Cloud Backup integrates with nearly all B&R products for archiving capabilities since it is represented as ordinary NAS share for B&R software. Backup and recovery software from competitor vendors like
IBM Spectrum Protect,
EMC NetWorker,
HP Data Protector
Data Protector software (originally Omniback) is automated backup and recovery software for single-server to enterprise environments, supporting disk storage or tape storage targets. It provides cross-platform, online backup of data for Micros ...
,
Dell vRanger,
Acronis Backup and others also have some level of integrations with NetApp storage systems.
Enterprise applications
NetApp systems can integrate with enterprise applications for backup purposes, cloning, provisioning, and other self-service storage features. Oracle DB can be connected using Direct NFS (dNFS) client build inside database app which will provide network performance, resiliency, load balancing for NFS protocol with ONTAP systems.
Oracle DB, Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2, MySQL, Mongo DB, SAP HANA, MS Exchange, VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen, KVM integrate with NetApp systems for provisioning, cloning and additional backup and recovery build - this includes capabilities like SnapShots, SnapVault and SnapMirror with a variety of software including NetApp's SnapCenter and SnapCreator.
OpenStack
NetApp systems have integration with such open source projects as OpenStack Cinder for Block storage (SolidFire, ONTAP, E-Series, OnCommand Insight, Cloud Backup), OpenStack Manila for Shared file system (ONTAP, OnCommand Insight), Docker persistent volumes through Trident plugin (SolidFire, ONTAP, E-Series) and others.
OEM
IBM used to OEM NetApp FAS systems under its own brand known as IBM N-series and this partnership ended May 29, 2014. Dell OEM NetApp E-Series under its own name PowerVault MD.
September 13, 2018, Lenovo and NetApp announced its technology partnership, so Lenovo OEM Netapp products under its own name: Lenovo ThinkSystem DE (using NetApp's EF & E-Series array technology), and ThinkSystem DM uses ONTAP software with Lenovo servers and supports FC-NVMe (analog for NetApp FAS & AFF systems).
Vector Data builds rugged and carrier-grade versions of NetApp FAS, AFF, E-Series and SolidFire products with -48V DC power and other customizations under their Vault product line.
Reception
Controversy
Syrian surveillance
In November 2011, during the
2011 Syrian uprising, NetApp was named as one of several companies whose products were being used in the Syrian government crackdown. The equipment was allegedly sold to the Syrians by an authorized NetApp reseller.
On April 7, 2014, NetApp was notified by the US Department of Commerce "that it had completed its review of this matter and determined that NetApp had not violated the U.S. export laws", and that the file on the matter had been closed.
Legal dispute with Sun Microsystems
In September 2007, NetApp started proceedings against
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
, claiming that the
ZFS
ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an ope ...
File System developed by Sun infringed its patents. The following month, Sun announced plans to countersue based on alleged misuse by NetApp of Sun's own patented technology. Several of NetApp's patent claims were rejected on the basis of
prior art
Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria ...
after re-examination by the
United States Patent and Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexa ...
. On September 9, 2010, NetApp announced an agreement with
Oracle Corporation (the new owner of Sun Microsystems) to dismiss the suits.
Accolades
NetApp was listed amongst Silicon Valley Top 25 Corporate Philanthropists in 2013. NetApp was Named Brand of the Year by the Think Global Awards in 2019.
See also
*
Write Anywhere File Layout
The Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) is a proprietary file system that supports large, high-performance RAID arrays, quick restarts without lengthy consistency checks in the event of a crash or power failure, and growing the filesystems size q ...
(WAFL), used in ONTAP storage systems
*
Team NetApp
A team is a group of individuals (human or non-human) working together to achieve their goal.
As defined by Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management, " team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to info ...
*
Kaleidescape
Kaleidescape, Inc. is an American multimedia company based in Mountain View, California. Founded in 2001, it designs multi-room home entertainment server systems that store and play back video and audio content (such as movies, television shows ...
References
Further reading
*
External links
*
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