By Richard Arneson
In 1992, several years prior to the Dot.com Bubble and when cell phones were the size, shape and weight of a canned ham, a company was born in Sunnyvale, California, located at the bottom tip of the San Francisco Bay. NetApp was the brainchild of three (3) individuals who had once worked for Auspex, a company against which they’d soon compete, and, just a decade later, help send into Chapter 11 and the OEM scrap heap.The Evolutionary Disruptor
Self-described as “the data authority for hybrid cloud,” NetApp made news in 2017 with its entry into the highly competitive Hyperconvergence Integrated Systems (HCIS) Market. In fact, their entry prompted Gartner to name them as an Evolutionary Disruptor in its 2017 Hyperconverged Integrated Systems (HCIS) Competitive Landscape study. Originally, NetApp determined that they couldn’t optimally deliver to VMs the true value of its SolidFire Element OS, their proven storage OS. Once they made that determination, they knew that entering the HCIS Market was in their near future. This soul-searching helped them realize that, architecturally-speaking, it made a lot more sense to package its Element OS on bare-metal storage nodes so customers could take advantage of:- NetApp’s all-flash architecture,
- Performance predictability through Quality of Service (QoS), and
- Compression and Inline Deduplication across entire clusters.
NetApp’s HCIS options
The NetApp HCIS offering starts with a minimum two (2) chassis, four (4) storage node configuration, after which additional nodes can be added independently. It offers four (4) flavors:- Small compute (16 cores) with small storage (5.5TB capacity),
- Medium compute (24 cores) with medium storage (11TB capacity), and
- Large compute (36 cores) with large storage (22TB capacity).
