Gentlemen, I really must protest. Network Appliance plays very nicely in a SAN environment and is working very actively on solutions and with partners in that area. May I respectfully refer you all to www.netapp.com/news/press to the announcement dated 02/02/2000. Six leading Storage Vendors Introduce the first NAS & SAN Data Protection Solution for Network Attached Storage Solutions, and may I respectfully refer you to www.vixel.com/NAS_SAN_EVENT/NAS_html which has a variety of articles and white papers, discussing their relationship with Network Appliance and how they work with us in SAN enviroments, and may I repectfully refer you to www.spectralogic.com/NetApp which also explains their relationship to Network Appliance and our integrated SAN solutions, and may I respectfully refer you to www.legato.com/News/index.html which has articles explaining their relationship with Network Appliance and our combined SAN-based architecture and solutions, and may I respectfully refer you to www.snia.org which has a new NAS work group and is also working on developing SAN standards. I would also like to reassure those of you, who have expressed a concern that Network Appliance is not planning future competitive products, that you are mistaken. Network Appliance is continuing to develop products which will compete sucessfully in both NAS and SAN environments.

-----Original Message----- From: Yael Hellmann [mailto:yael_hellmann@yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2000 6:56 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: re: nas storage

Jeff probably hit the point - NetApp do not have a solution for SAN and I think that NetApp should re-think their direction. With more and more vendors competing in the nas /san domain, these products will be better and provide more functionality and better performance. The current connectivity limitations will be eliminated. With fibre fabric you will not be limited to the current limited implementation. I think that NetApps products are great but I am disappointed that they don't plan for future competitive products.

-----Original Message----- From: Jeff Van Cleave [mailto:jeffvc@icopyright.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2000 6:13 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: nas storage

NetApp is not designed to compete with SAN - and yes, you cannot say that 100mb ethernet will compete with fiber channel.

However, direct attach has limitations in the number of servers it can connect to. At last check, EMC can connect with 32 systems. Hitachi can connect to a large number with a channel box (I don't know the high end limit). But you are limited by the length of cable between the SAN and the server.

Basically we approached using NetApp as a replacement for all of our NFS servers, and to some extent our data servers. For direct attach, we will probably go with Hitachi.

I think in any environment, both SAN and NetApp can be used effectively. It is not really an argument of which one is better, but what is your functional requirement and how will those needs be met.

Jeff

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