SpinNP is the answer to mainstream storage scale-out scalability
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