When I look at NetApp's brochure, there is no reference to any "standards" or their membership/affiliation to any of the scores of industry consortiums. I tried my best to get something in writing from NetApp stating their commitment on standards.
I apologize, and I'll see if I can figure out what happened to your request. In the meantime, I assure you that we have a strong commitment to standards, although not to all the same ones that a general purpose vendor would.
Network protocols are the critical standards for a network appliance (i.e. any dedicated network device, such as a router or network printer). Unlike a general purpose system, we do not have to comply with standards relating to user commands, programming interfaces, or internal kernel interfaces. So you won't see us worrying about POSIX or the kernel VFS (virtual file system) interface. One of our big advantages as an appliance vendor is that our implementation is not constrained by standards internal to the system. (Cisco doesn't run BSD or System V either!)
But we absolutely track the standards relating to file service protocols. The most important standards are those for TCP/IP, NFSv2, NFSv3, HTTP, and CIFS. (We actually shipped NFSv3 before Sun did!) CIFS, the standard file service protocol for Win95 and NT, is more fluid than the others, and we have an agreement with Microsoft that gives us good access to changes that they are making.
The file service protocols are the obvious critical standards, but there are many others that we support as well, including standards for DNS, telnet, inetd, RPC, XDR, portmapper, lockd, NIS, ARP, RMT, rdate, NDMP, syslog, SMTP, etc. Most (if not all) of these have RFCs describing them. We support many of these in client-mode only, such as NIS, DNS, SMTP, etc., because our goal is not to serve these protocols, but to be a client to them in order to simplify administration. I suppose I should include networking standards too, such as Ethernet (10 and 100), FDDI, CDDI and ATM. We have Gigabit Ethernet working in the lab.
We co-developed the NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) protocol to allow better interoperability between 3rd party backup tools, file server vendors, and tape jukebox vendors, and are working with a number of other vendors to promote this standard. (See www.ndmp.org.)
Tom, would something like this note be sufficient if it were printed on NetApp letter head? (Alternately, is the electronic note sufficient as it stands?) Please let me know...
Dave