Network Appliance (NetApp), the company creates storage systems and management software associated with companies data. They offer products that cater for small, medium and large companies and can provide support.
The NetApp filer also know as NetApp Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS) is a type of disk storage device which owns and controls a filesystem and present files and directories over the network, it uses an operating systems called Data ONTAP. |
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The line of NetApp filers was the company's flagship since the very beginning. A filer is a type of disk storage device which owns and controls a filesystem, and presents files and directories to hosts over the network. This scheme is sometimes called file storage, as opposed to the block storage that has been traditionally provided by major storage vendors like EMC Corporation and Hitachi Data Systems.
NetApp's filers initially used NFS and CIFS protocols based on standard local area networks (LANs), whereas block storage consolidation required storage area networks (SANs) implemented with the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. In 2002, in an attempt to increase market share, NetApp added block storage access as well. Today, NetApp systems support it via FC protocol, the iSCSI protocol, and the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol.
The filers use NetApp's proprietary operating system called Data ONTAP which includes code from Berkeley Net/2 BSD Unix and other operating systems.[7] Data ONTAP originally only supported NFS, but CIFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel were later added ("Unified Storage" concept model). Today, NetApp provides two variants of Data ONTAP. Data ONTAP 7G and a nearly complete rewrite[7] called Data ONTAP GX, based upon grid technology acquired from Spinnaker Networks. In the near future these software product lines will be merged into one OS - Data ONTAP 8, which will fold Data ONTAP 7G onto the Data ONTAP GX cluster platform.
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