I’m awaiting the release of OnTap 8.0, but there are several things I’m waiting for that will come after 8.0.
Jeff O’Neal, NetApp’s senior director of Data Center Solutions, said Data OnTap 8.0 — which will merge Data OnTap 7G with the Data OnTap GX cluster platform — will be released later this year. “NetApp remains on track to release our first converged operating system in calendar ’09,” O’Neal told Enterprise Storage Forum.
This is exciting if they can get 8.0 released this year. That means we might be able to look forward to 8.1 coming out sometime 2010. 8.1 should be an even more exciting release from what I’ve heard through the grape vine. I’m hoping still that 8.0 might have some of the advancements that GX had in the core OS. I’m hoping for tab-complete, a more GX light na-admin, and quite a few other GX like enhancements.
What do you guys think? What have you heard about 8.0?
Heck — I was hoping for a good stable version of GX without any glaring bugs. I am not horribly pessimistic of GX, it has some killer features (volume moves, global namespace, striping, etc). I have been hunting for some answers on Ontap 8, even little things. For some reason Netapp has been a bit tight lipped.
May 19, 2009 at 7:23 amI’ve gotten some details out of our TGA, but there are some interesting things I’m hoping for. I run 10.0.4 in production for a large web based media system and it was a little bumpy at first with the early revisions of 10.0 but it’s become very stable. I did hear that we might get automatic domain controller discovery and a few other enhancements that are 7G related to the GX version. I moved away from large striped volumes to junction points due to managability of “hot” volumes, very cool stuff in GX.
My big wait is on 8.1, hopefully their first scalable block OS. Right now file is great, but they really need to compete on the block level as well. I sure am hoping that the press release comes out soon for some product details. It’s getting hyped a little more lately due to the fear of NetApp’s quarterlys.
May 19, 2009 at 8:54 am