Vendor: NetApp, Inc.
Background
NetApp was founded as Network Appliance Inc. in 1992 by David Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm (rebranding in 2008 with a legal name change to NetApp Inc). Following VC funding from Sequoia Capital, the company went public with an IPO in 1995.
Hardware History
The core technology at the heart of NetApp is the filer or file server. Auspex Systems had been the first to release a network-attached storage device. However, NetApp pioneered the NAS market with the development of hardware solutions running the Data ONTAP (now simply ONTAP) storage operating system.
ONTAP was successful because it had many early (and patented) innovations, such as snapshots, incremental replication, and an on-disk data structure (WAFL) that delivered dynamic RAID. WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) is an architecture, not a file system, which uses a method of data storage called redirect-on-write (RoW). RoW enables efficient snapshot management, as data doesn’t need to be copied or moved during the snapshot process. This capability allows WAFL to take almost instant snapshots through metadata manipulation and with the minimum possible storage overhead.
The initial success of ONTAP and hardware-based appliances drove NetApp’s business through the dotcom crash and into the new millennium. In 2004, NetApp acquired Spinnaker Networks, the developers of a scale-out clustered NAS technology called SpinOS. This solution was subsequently released as ONTAP GX in 2006. Rather than run multiple product lines, NetApp attempted to align the heritage ONTAP and ONTAP GX into a single platform with the release of ONTAP 8.0. Although using the same name, ONTAP 8.0 7-mode and cluster mode were effectively two different products. Additionally, some features from the previous release of heritage ONTAP (7G release 7.3.2) were removed to smooth the merge process. You can read more about the implications of this strategy in our blog post from 2014. The two ONTAP code bases were eventually aligned into a single platform, which today still retains the ONTAP name.
In 2011, NetApp acquired the Engenio storage platform from LSI, rebranding it as the E-Series. This hardware is a range of simplified and high-performance block storage solutions that also underpins NetApp’s scale-out object store platform, StorageGRID. StorageGRID came from the acquisition of Bycast in 2010.
NetApp acquired SolidFire at the end of 2015 for approximately $870 million in cash, adding a scale-out block storage platform to the portfolio. The SF-series of solutions were used in the short-lived NetApp HCI platform. In November 2022, NetApp announced End of Availability for the SolidFire product line, with final shipments in October 2023.
The ONTAP platform continues to be the core product for on-premises storage. NetApp upgraded the FAS platforms to support all-flash storage, branding the solutions AFF. In 2023, NetApp relaunched the All-SAN Array (ASA), first announced in 2019. Also in 2023, NetApp announced the C-Series, a capacity-optimised all-flash array. At Insight 2023, NetApp announced the ASA C-Series, providing block and file-based ONTAP solutions for standard and capacity-optimised workloads. A third generation of ASA A-Series appliances was announced at Insight 2024.
Public Cloud
In 2017, NetApp started a journey towards embracing the public cloud. From the beginning of 2018, the company re-organised to include a Cloud Business Unit. As we discuss in this post from April 2018, the concept of the Data Fabric drove many acquisitions, including Spot, Greenqloud, StackPointCloud, Cognigo, Fylamynt, Talon, CloudJumper, CloudHawk, Data Mechanics, Instaclustr and CloudCheckr.
The result of establishing the Cloud BU has been two-fold. First, NetApp was able to gradually port ONTAP into public cloud infrastructure, starting by running ONTAP as a virtual instance and eventually partnering with AWS, Google Cloud and Azure to offer ONTAP as a native cloud file service.