Now that NetApp have swarmed out of the anthill to defend the Newspeak we find ourselves through the looking glass and into the wonderful land of delusion. Lets take the common refrains and look at them rationally.
Assertion: Data ONTAP is a Unified OS and the single architecture for all workloads.
Response: Without even talking about how different the modes are in operation before you do a thing you have to choose from one of two modes at installation time and neither mode can replicate to systems running the other.
I’ll write that again, a system running ONTAP 8 7-Mode cannot replicate data to a system running ONTAP 8 Cluster-Mode and vice versa.
ONTAP isn’t a Unified OS, it’s a brand. They could call StorageGrid or Engenio ONTAP and it’ll be about as Unified as Cluster-Mode and 7-Mode. There is no unification here beyond the block diagram they’ll draw on your white board and that diagram is not connected to reality but to brand marketing.
Assertion: There’s nothing wrong with ONTAP for large datasets, Engenio is just cheaper to buy.
Response: Lets turn to the transcript.
MR THOMAS GEORGENS: There are workloads which have a set of requirements that lie outside the current and anticipated design centre of ONTAP
That quote is as clear as crystal. ONTAP doesn’t cut it for Big Data. ONTAP doesn’t cut it for big data so we had to buy what we derogatorily referred to “legacy” storage arrays with RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, COFW Snapshots and Fibre Channel in order to serve those workloads.
And here we are right at the limits of NetApp Newspeak where only the corporate Lotus eaters will say nothing has really changed even after they’ve admitted to everyone but themselves that Purpose Built was not only the right approach but the necessary approach all along.
