Finding NEMEA: NetApp loses northern Europe chief NetApp in Europe has seen the resignation of its northern region head, Dave Allen. The company confirmed Allen's departure, saying: "Dave Allen has decided to leave NetApp. We wish Dave Allen success in his new ventures, and thank him for his contributions. In the interim, Gos Hein van de Wouw, VP and head of Strategy and …
They make NAS (Network Attached Storage) arrays. Essentially the same thing as the Synology or D-Link boxes you might have at home, just "enterprise costclass" and based on proprietary hardware and a tweaked version of BSD Unix (called OnTAP) rather than Linux.
A NAS serves files (yes, it's a fancy name for a "file server") whereas a SAN (Storage Area Network) works at a lower level and serves blocks from it's array of disk drives (yes, it's a fancy name for a networked "RAID Array" ... though often omitting the "inexpensive" dimension).
I know I am Mr. NetApp Apologist, but comparing a dlink NAS to a netapp filer is like comparing a usb 1.1 2GB flash key to an SLC SSD. They are both solid state storage, but one is far more capable than the other (and yes, more expensive).
The big selling point - or downside depending on your perspective - with NetApp is the proprietary file system they use called WAFL. This allows for some nifty things that can be done to solve many problems - mostly around snapshots. NetApp was one of the first to offer deduplication, and you can run block devices (luns - iscsi or FC) ontop of this file system and garner the same benefits.
Being able to use NAS or block based storage on the same device and the same pool of disks is pretty cool - we have moved from FC to NFS in one our vmware environments as it has allowed us greatly reduce the number of datastores (there are no limits to the number of VMs on a datastore due to locking or whatever) we have while providing comparable performance to FC. Its also much easier to manage than FC or iscsi.
BTW - calling a storage array (network endpoint of disks) a SAN (storage area network) is like calling a Windows File Server a LAN (local area network). I could throttle the marketing person that decided to call a storage array a SAN in a PowerPoint to some PHB somewhere (probably at Dell).
NetApp is the Pepsi of the Storage Industry. The Cola Wars are over, hence NetApp executives departing. Life at a disintegrating company is quite stressful, so they join a fun little startup where they sit around until retirement ....
The engineers and technical people unfortunately don't have that bright future. They have to operate the bilge pumps until disillusionment kicks in.
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