After almost two years of maintaining the line that flash is good only as accelerator, NetApp finally firmed up its all-flash storage array roadmap. First came EF540, a Flash version of EF5400, NetApp's present top-end disk-array a product-line that was brought through Engenio acquisition. Luckily this time NetApp decided not to take the path of ONTAP integration and adopted Engenio's SANtricity as its second OS. It helped NetApp to shorten the path between technology acquisition and taking it to the market. A distinct sign that NetApp has permanently dropped its policy of one company one OS, NetApp also took up the challenge to develop a new OS for Flash drives. Tagged as project Mars, NetApp developed this product with a few of its old-timer technical stalwarts, isolated from it mainstream engineering development over last two years. FlashRay, the new platform developed for the flash system, is expected to be released as beta, by around the end of this year. It probably will take another 6-12 months for NetApp to take the new product through its engineering verification process and mature it as a product. But the announcement has already created enough flutter in the market. It is clear that FlashRay is carved out of ONTAP. In all likelihood it has all the popular ONTAP gears like snapshot, deduplication, scale-out clustering. It is expected to support seamlessly all NetApp Data protection software like snap* suites but it is not clear how much of the FlashRay is not ONTAP.
After its failed attempt to acquire XtremeIO, NetApp did not have
anything to offer to its customers looking for SSD-scale performance. EF540 has filled that lacuna in NetApp's portfolio especially in SAN space. But FlashRay will be NetApp's flagship platform for SSDs and hybrid storage for the future. It is expected to counter EMC's yet to be launched high-performance Flash-array, being developed as Project-X. Project-X, if one goes by the buzz in the Industry, is built over XtremeIO's technology which EMC bought last year.
From the engineering standpoint a design excavation was a long-due item for ONTAP, its storage OS for last 20 years. Fact is ONTAP already is quite heavy with years of additions of features and injections of codes to take care of diverse needs that it was not designed for to start with. Although WAFL[ONTAP's File system] designers took inspiration from Log-structured File system besides FFS and Episode from Berkeley in the beginning [see Dave's Blog], it was originally designed for a NAS server that maximized NFS write throughput. Obviously it cannot make efficient use of Flash read/write throughput unlike HDD. Flash wearing is another problem that WAFL needed to be made aware of [WAFL can recognize disk failure but memory loss due to wearing is a different problem] So WAFL needed an overhaul for it to be useful for all Flash-system or even hybrid storage arrays.
With XtremeIO, EMC got a head-start in all-flash array space. Though NetApp lost its bid to buy XtremeIO, it still could pick another Flash startup [Violin memory, whiptail among others] but experience taught them that a home-grown alternative, if one can build, is always a credible and safe bet. Spinnaker acquisition taught them that buying a startup technology and integrating it into its its existing portfolio is fraught with high complexity and delay. Datadomain acquisition taught them that buying a proven startup may not be that easy with EMC getting stronger every year. They had a proven Deduplication solution and it was that home-grown Deduplication solution which saved them in front of the customers when Datadomain deal fell through. So they did not want to commit the same mistake for Flash. Some commented that NetApp took up Mars project after its acquisition bid for XtremeIO fell through but that hardly sounds logical. NetApp has a strong engineering capability, no doubt, but developing a winning product requires a lot more careful planning and long-term budget-commitment that hardly can be expected from a knee-jerk response to a failed acquisition attempt.
Many suspect that NetApp will keep its option of buying a Flash startup open [in fact some of its customers are buying flash-based storage controllers from a specific start-up with full knowledge that the startup is on radar of NetApp and they expect NetApp to buy that startup in the long run] but there are chances that FlashRay will find persistent and passionate support from the NetApp engineering community, starved for a long-time to work on ground-breaking innovations, making it another success story for NetApp engineering. Re-engineering Ontap and WAFL has also another advantage, they can reuse the experience to trim their mainstream version of Ontap.
How the flashArray will fare in the market is in the realm of speculation but this endeavour will surely prove to its own people that NetApp still values its engineering team.
