BANGALORE, INDIA: In 2009, when NetApp lost the battle with storage giant EMC in its race for Data Domain, many thought that the troubled NAS player would be the next acquisition target. However, even after a year, it is still guarding its forte 'single-handedly', unlike other pure-play storage players such as Compellent or 3Par, who went in for bigger suitors.

Syed Masroor, pre-sales manager, NetApp India, in a candid chat with CIOL talks about NetApp's unified storage plans, its tag being still referred to as a NAS player and not unified storage player, why it is happy being a pure-play storage player and how it is more than just a hardware player today. Excerpts:

CIOL: Can you tell us about your unified product FlexPod and how is it different from EMC's VBlock?

Syed Masroor: NetApp pioneered the concept of unified storage in 2002. We unified SAN, NAS and iSCSI into one storage system.

FlexPod is basically a VMware, Cisco UCS server, Nexus Switches and NetApp all brought together in a standard format, where performance and scalability is guaranteed. It offers secure multi-tenancy and is a packaged product that can be readily deployed.

Also Read: Acquisitions: The year that was for storage industry
 
NetApp built multi-tenancy into its storage system back in 2002, with MultiStore. What it does is exactly what VMware does, but from a storage standpoint.

MultiStore can partition a physical NetApp system into 64 virtual systems, similar to how VMware partitions a physical sever into multiple virtual servers. Thus, NetApp can create a virtual machine, a virtual server and integrate them. That means that with NetApp, one can have multiple virtual NetApp systems on one hardware.

Thus, we can have ten different customers on the same hardware and guarantee security, from servers to the disk layer.

Moreover, our configurations are not tightly bound. We provide flexibility for customers in terms of number of servers and storage systems.

So what we brought was a highly flexible environment and at the same time is highly dynamic in terms of security features and multi tenancy. I think that is where the difference is.

CIOL: Although NetApp pioneered the concept of unified storage back in 2002, you have been always known as a NAS player. Is that why you have been of late concentrating more on unified storage with new launches and announcements?

Syed: We keep fighting against this tag. Our customers are our biggest advocates of our acceptance in the market that we are in, as a unified storage product company.

NetApp started off as a NAS company back in 1992. With our first system we could do file service to Unix market. Then we brought file services to Windows, thus introducing the first multi-protocol system.

A decade later, in 2002, when others were only introducing NAS, NetApp had already created a NAS market; a billion dollar worth of business product.

However, back then, we could see that a lot of applications will go on SAN. However, when we introduced SAN, we did not introduce it on a separate system like others.

NetApp said SAN is a protocol. So if you can speak fibre channel protocol language then you have SAN. Thus we integrated that language into our existing operating system, so that our customers, who were doing NAS, were able to do SAN also in the same system.

Today we have 1,80,000 unified systems deployed and moreover, iSCSI protocol ships free with every NetApp system today.