netapp

S3 is the de facto API for all object storage now, whether it's from EMC, NetApp, etc.

Though it is most likely still flat files, storage is no longer Unix FS on NetApp.

You ring up Netapp and buy a solution for say $100,000 and plug it in.

We ended up buying those ridiculous chrome-plated NetApp fileservers to handle the load.

Nimble use a log storage format similar to that of Netapp and ZFS.

When I worked closely with the enterprise account teams at NetApp that was always something to consider.

If you buy a NetAPP and plug it in your netork it is because you cant architect a datacenter from the ground up...

Perhaps one of the more practical uses was figuring out how to scale storage performance when I was at NetApp.

When I was at NetApp there were lots of times when drive firmware for the 'less used' options would fail.

If you're in the on-premises storage industry (aka NetApp, EMC), you will be amazed by the number of companies still buy networked storage arrays.

It's actually starting to go that way in some enterprise environments, especially in storage where ditching the overhead of EMC/IBM/NetApp has a potentially high reward.

Props to netapp for funding and driving the bhyve project.

I think it was Brian Pawlowski at NetApp that said "You can count on two things working right in a hard drive, read, write, and seek." The joke being that you needed all three of them to work for reliable disk operation.

One was that Netapp's storage model was file based (rather than block based) and so part of the problem was scaling the operation of a file state machine, and the other serious sub-problem was the creating a reliable way to keeping protocol/process state that was in "flight" in order to recover from failures.

The Unix file system is pretty good at not losing your data, especially if you put the files on a Netapp.