Re: Microsoft FAIL
"Why one would put OnTAP 'in the cloud' when there are much leaner and meaner (and cheaper) solutions available is a mystery."
Data OnTAP is what gives NetApp its value at this point--there's no particular secret to building chassis with hard drives and slapping some management logic on the whole thing. OnTAP has a shedload of useful features, including high-performance CIFS and NFS presentation, deduplication and compression, application-aware snapshots, etc. There are also a great many NetApp loyalists who would no doubt find appealing the idea of a cloud service which runs familiar tools and features. The back end storage will, in fact, probably be lean and mean (or cheap and cheerful); OnTAP gives clients a powerful and feature-filled way to manage it.