NetApp’s acquisition of Bycast puts HP and IBM in an interesting bind. We know of about 100 customers using Bycast running on HP (HP MAS) and IBM (IBM GMAS) servers. Maybe the IBM-NetApp OEM arrangement will resolve IBMs stance on this but I can see HP giving NetApp-Bycast the stink eye already.
Never mind. EMC has been providing object storage solutions to thousands of customers for more than a decade.
Having seen Bycast in deployment myself the first thing I noticed was the triple management layer of Universal Access, Grid Management and Archive Management. It’s hardly a turnkey solution to deploy and manage it also struck me as odd that the product be called a grid when in reality it’s just one application running on a cluster and doesn’t realise any of the benefits of true Grid computing.
But now I'm just nitpicking at marketing spin.
Regardless history has shown NetApp will promise it’ll be fully integrated into ONTAP about 18 months from now which means they’ll do a press release saying it’s done in 2016.
But they’ll not deliver the code until the point release after that.
Alas poor Spinnaker..
