ONTAP or Data ONTAP or Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) or Data ONTAP 7-Mode is
NetApp
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 ...
's proprietary operating system used in storage
disk array
A disk array is a disk storage system which contains multiple disk drives. It is differentiated from a disk enclosure, in that an array has cache memory and advanced functionality, like RAID, deduplication, encryption and virtualization.
Compo ...
s such as NetApp
FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. With the release of version 9.0, NetApp decided to simplify the Data ONTAP name and removed the word "Data" from it, and remove the 7-Mode image, therefore, ONTAP 9 is the successor of Clustered Data ONTAP 8.
ONTAP includes code from
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
''Net/2'' and ''4.4BSD-Lite'', Spinnaker Networks technology, and other operating systems.
[
]
ONTAP originally only supported NFS, but later added support for
SMB,
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 ...
, and
Fibre Channel Protocol
Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) is the SCSI interface protocol utilising an underlying Fibre Channel connection. The Fibre Channel standards define a high-speed data transfer mechanism that can be used to connect workstations, mainframes, supercomput ...
(including
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 ...
and
FC-NVMe). On June 16, 2006, NetApp released two variants of Data ONTAP, namely Data ONTAP 7G and, with nearly a complete rewrite,
Data ONTAP GX. Data ONTAP GX was based on grid technology acquired from Spinnaker Networks. In 2010 these software product lines merged into one OS - Data ONTAP 8, which folded Data ONTAP 7G onto the Data ONTAP GX cluster platform.
Data ONTAP 8 includes two distinct operating modes held on a single firmware image. The modes are called ONTAP 7-Mode and ONTAP Cluster-Mode. The last supported version of ONTAP 7-Mode issued by NetApp was version 8.2.5. All subsequent versions of ONTAP (version 8.3 and onwards) have only one operating mode - ONTAP Cluster-Mode.
NetApp storage arrays use highly customized hardware and the