NetApp, Inc. (nasdaq: NTAP), formerly Network Appliance, Inc., is a proprietary computer storage and data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is a member of the NASDAQ-100 and ranks as the number one place to work on the Fortune 1000. NetApp is credited with the widespread adoption of network-attached storage (NAS) architecture as an alternative to storage area network (SAN) architecture.
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NetApp, Inc. (nasdaq: NTAP), formerly Network Appliance, Inc., is a proprietary computer storage and data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is a member of the NASDAQ-100 and ranks as the number one place to work on the Fortune 1000. NetApp is credited with the widespread adoption of network-attached storage (NAS) architecture as an alternative to storage area network (SAN) architecture.
History
NetApp was founded in 1992 by David Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm. At the time, its major competitor was Auspex. In 1994, NetApp received venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital. It had its initial public offering in 1995. NetApp thrived in the internet bubble years of the mid 1990s to 2001, during which the company grew to $1 billion in annual revenue. After the bubble burst, NetApp's revenues quickly declined to $800 million in its fiscal year 2002. Since then, the company's revenues have steadily climbed.
Filers
main: NetApp filer The line of NetApp filers was the company's flagship since the very beginning. A filer is a type of disk storage device which owns and controls a filesystem, and presents files and directories to hosts over the network. This scheme is sometimes called file storage, as opposed to the block storage that has been traditionally provided by major storage vendors like EMC Corporation and Hitachi Data Systems.
NetApp's filers initially used NFS and CIFS protocols based on standard local area networks (LANs), whereas block storage consolidation required storage area networks (SANs) implemented with the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. In 2002, in an attempt to increase market share, NetApp added block storage access as well. Today, NetApp systems support it via FC protocol, the iSCSI protocol, and the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol.
The filers use NetApp's proprietary operating system called Data ONTAP with code originally copied from Berkeley Net/2 BSD Unix. Data ONTAP originally only supported NFS, but CIFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel were later added ("Unified Storage" concept model). Today, NetApp provides two variants of Data ONTAP. Data ONTAP 7G and a nearly complete rewriteFact: date=April 2008 called Data ONTAP GX, based upon grid technology acquired from Spinnaker Networks. In the near future these software product lines will be merged into one OS - Data ONTAP 8, which will fold Data ONTAP 7G onto the Data ONTAP GX cluster platform.
In 2006, NetApp launched a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) product for magnetic tape data storage virtualization.
In 2007 NetApp introduced its own deduplication technology: NetApp Dedupe, available for all current NetApp filers.
Datafort
Acquired from the Decru acquisition, the Decru Datafort storage encryption device is used to encrypt NFS, CIFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage. The series also includes a lifetime key management appliance to store and safeguard the encryption keys.
