The revisionist history of unified storage

If you turn back time to the start of this millennium, the choice between SAN and NAS for centralized storage was a highly contested decision. The eventual winner was both. By 2002, NetApp had firmly established itself as the leader in NAS, when NetApp^® ONTAP^® launched support for both block and file protocols in a single product. This innovation marked the birth of unified storage and signaled an end to the age of storage silos.

Customers who leverage ONTAP as their single, unified platform know that it saves them time and money that would otherwise be wasted in buying multiple niche products and managing separate storage silos for each of their enterprise workloads.

NetApp’s rapid pace of innovation is fueled by our ability to develop and harden new enterprise storage features once, instead of repeating that engineering effort across multiple independent architectures.

Our primary competitors acknowledge the advantages of this unified approach. EMC was the first to follow our lead. Dell EMC now markets most of their block platforms as unified. In practice, given their lack of native enterprise file features or their need for bolt-on NAS gateways, limits where they can also do file.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is now touting the benefits of unified storage with their Alletra Storage MP products. These products are separate platforms that run code from two different companies (HPE and VAST Data) on incompatible hardware platforms that share the same name. This isn’t unified by anyone else’s definition.

Not to be left behind, Pure declared FlashArray, which runs the “Purity OS,” to be the first “truly unified block and file platform.” The fact is that Pure didn’t even exist as a company when ONTAP pioneered unified storage. FlashArray still struggles with many enterprise file workloads. It seems that Pure’s first attempt to claim the unified crown fell flat.

Pure still positions FlashBlade as their primary platform for enterprise file workloads. FlashBlade employs a radically different architecture that’s built on unique hardware with different software, which they renamed “Purity OS.” Pure’s most recent unified claim is centered around what they call the “Pure Storage Platform”. It represents FlashArray and FlashBlade as a single storage OS with multiprotocol capabilities.

This name game does nothing to eliminate costly and incompatible data silos for Pure customers. That would be like NetApp renaming StorageGRID^® to ONTAP, then claiming that ONTAP is now a unified platform for enterprise storage plus a distributed data repository for lifecycle management.

While our competitors struggle to catch up with what ONTAP introduced 23 years ago, NetApp continues to expand the definition of unified beyond just enterprise block and file protocols. ONTAP is the only major storage platform on the market that offers the unified triple threat of block, file, and object protocols.

Software-defined storage can introduce yet another storage silo, especially at the edge of the network or in remote locations. ONTAP Select unifies those locations on a common platform and data fabric spanning core to cloud.

Unified storage must also include the cloud. ONTAP is available in the major public cloud marketplaces, and it also powers first-party, enterprise-grade storage as a service from Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM, with full integration into their respective control planes. None of our competitors offer first-party cloud storage from even one of the major hyperscalers.

It’s rare for so many competing vendors to agree, but the consensus is clear. Unified storage is more pragmatic than the complexity associated with multiple storage silos. NetApp is proud to have led the industry to a better place.

If you’re looking to reduce your storage costs and drive better operational efficiencies, look to NetApp ONTAP, the past, present and future leader in unified storage.