Is there nothing real to report? Just a bunch of wild speculation, given the fact that they could scale to more procs in a single box already (8-proc ( 32 cores or later 48 cores) is no problem), ntap looks to have other problems than a pci-e switching solution.

Hi Chris,

Really interesting speculation here. Without raining on VirtenSys' parade too much, our Data ONTAP 8 scalability is based on a transport-independent protocol called SpinNP. While it is capable of accommodating PCIe, I would urge you to look at Cisco's Data Center Class & Brocade's Enhanced (lossless) Ethernet technologies as our interconnects of choice when we ship the first phase of our mainstream scale-out storage family later this year.

Your conclusion is spot-on though! With DOT8, NetApp customers will be able to aggregate any number of FAS controllers (in pairs) as nodes in a single system image with atomic management properties and linear performance as well as capacity scalability.

Val Bercovici

Office of the CTO

NetApp

NetApp is positioning themselves well for possibly sourcing hardware (and software) from SUN, if their legal case goes badly.

A Network Appliance box with SUN inside would be a great combination, since:

- NetApp would be able to stop development on proprietary software technology that really does not buy them any advantage over Open Source Solaris & ZFS

- SUN is already producing platforms with PCIe

Yes and there used to be token ring switches to try to work around the scalability problems of the underlying protocol as well.

Is it just me, or is this just done because ONTAP doesn´t scale of larger amounts of cores. With more and more cores performance even in cheap boxes should be more than sufficient to build faster filers. 2 Socket and four socket are volume hardware. So i do not really see the need for such clustering protocols adding complexity to the system.

And by the way: The SpinNP stuff don´t impress me much ... pure pNFS should do the same for NFS and is standardized ...

"NetApp is positioning themselves well for possibly sourcing hardware (and software) from SUN, if their legal case goes badly....." Dave, I thougt you Sunsiners had already assured us NetApp didn't have a chance against The Divine Right Of Sun? And how you make this bizarre speculation from the article is beyond any form of logic. PCIe is a standard so if NetApp needed to source any hardware from anyone (and why they should you don't say) they could source it from any server vendor, so why choose the dying minnow of Sun? Anyway, didn't you hear the announcement about hp ProLiant support - Sun have just outsourced their server business.

As for the bit about NetApp stopping development to take a step back to use the Sun copy ZFS, I can only conclude you are posting from a cocaine factory whilst not wearing a dust mask. Sun have admitted they based ZFS on ONTAP, which means NetApp were already ahead of Sun in development and have probably developed further since. Why on Earth would they want to go backwards? Oh, I forgot - that kind of thing happens a lot in the Sunshiner fabtasy world.