Sam Schorr writes:
It does not seem farfetched to expect Network Appliance to use the same model that has led to open sourcing in other areas. If they have chosen to integrate the drivers directly into ONTap instead of calling the drivers as needed, and if they have not adhered to whatever standards exist for those interfaces, then NetApp has self-created a monopoly. It will go the way of all monopolies - competition will force them out of business or into supporting more flexible configurations.
You might have a point if NetApp was in a commodity market, like PC clones, rather than a niche, high availability market.
By ignoring how all the commodity makers create mass-market cheap junk and concentrating on characterizing specific hardware for a specific task, that of reliably delivering NFS and CIFS packets come hell or high water, they inhabit a world where concerns about catering to the person who moans because he can't add his favourite $80 ethernet card to an $80,000 piece of industrial equipment are simply irrelevant.
My company has chosen to value uptime highly, so highly in fact that they are willing to pay the price for this kind of equipment that can deliver it. The resulting complete lack of concern about how the server is doing frees me to think about other things, like helping to migrate people off of Windows NT for example.
It also boils down to where you, as systems guy, want to spend your time. I, for example, could have simply bought a Windows NT Back Office setup to do mail, DNS, DHCP, etc. serving, but instead I chose to build my own net-services server with a solid PC and NetBSD. I believed, and time has shown me to be right, that I would get better reliability and ROI from doing that. I could have also tried to roll-my-own NFS server with NetBSD--after all, it supports striping, and RAID can't be all that hard can it? As it happens, it *is* that hard, so I chose to convince the CEO that NetApp is the right box for that area. Three years later, he's a happy guy, and I have a secure job.
-bmw